Lawyers: Fiancé’s words could’ve changed trial
Conflicting accounts of the night of the murder not shared, defense says.
Death row inmate BASTROP — Rodney Reed’s original trial lawyers took to the stand on the third day of a hearing looking into his innocence claims, telling the court they would have presented a different case had they known that victim Stacey Stites’ fiancé had provided inconsistent statements about his whereabouts the night before her murder.
The four-day hearing in Bastrop addresses a CNN interview from last year, in which a Bastrop County sheriff ’s investigator, Curtis Davis, told reporters that Jimmy Fennell, Stites’ fiancé, gave him a different account of what happened the night before Stites’ death than he testified to in court. Davis said that Fennell told him he was out drinking after playing baseball and came home late, after Stites went to bed. In court, Fennell said he had been home with Stites most of the evening.
“Why would a guy lie about that? What motive?” Calvin Garvie, who defended Reed in 1998, said on the stand Thursday. “Those are two different statements. On one of the most important days of his life.”
On April 23, 1996, Stites, 19, was found raped and strangled along a rural road in Bastrop County with Reed’s DNA on her body. Reed was convicted of capital murder in 1998 and sentenced to death. For 20 years, he has maintained his innocence. His attorneys point to Fennell as the more likely killer.
Garvie said Thursday the defense had been strapped getting ready for Reed’s original trial, with only six months to prepare and three attorneys to interview 278 state witnesses — a daunting, if not impossible task, he said. “We had a limited time to do everything,” Garvie said. “They probably had a year or more ahead of us.”
He said if they had known about Fennell’s inconsistent statements, they could have talked to more