After an hourslong rally outside the governor’s mansion in downtown Austin on Saturday, hundreds of people chanting “Free Rodney Reed” briefly blocked streets around the Texas Capitol in an impromptu march led by the brother of the man the state plans to execute on November 20.
The crowd that gathered on Governor Greg Abbott’s doorstep represents just a sliver of the growing outcry over Reed’s pending execution for the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites in Bastrop. Since Reed’s conviction in 1998, a flood of new evidence has called his guilt into question and drawn enormous attention to the case—most recently from syndicated daytime talk show host “Dr. Phil” McGraw, who gave Reed’s innocence claim a major signal boost in a two-part series that aired last month. The widespread calls for officials to stop, or at the very least delay, Reed’s execution now range from mega-celebrities like Beyoncé and Oprah to a bipartisan coalition of more than three dozen Texas lawmakers. Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, who traveled to Austin to speak alongside Reed’s family at Saturday’s rally, started a petition last week imploring that Abbott halt the execution; it’s already gathered more than 2.5 million signatures.
Over the past two decades, journalists, forensic pathologists, independent investigators, and attorneys with the Innocence Project have largely discredited the state’s case against Reed. That has included undermining the sole evidence linking him to the murder: sperm cells matching his DNA that were recovered from Stites’ body, which prosecutors used to bolster their timeline of her murder. Reed, who is black, and others have maintained that he and Stites, who was white, had a consensual affair. While Reed says he and Stites had sex two days before her body was found on the side of a country road, state witnesses told jurors that his DNA had to have been left just hours before her death. In the two decades since, however, a number of forensic experts have debunked that theory. The medical examiner who conducted Stites’ autopsy walked back his testimony, as did the employees of a state crime lab and a private DNA lab.
