Contrasts sharp as Reed hearing ends
Lawyers don’t expect to see visiting judge’s findings until January.
A four-day hearing on death row inmate Rodney Reed’s bid for a new trial closed Friday with sharp disagreement between the prosecution and defense over the Bastrop man’s innocence and the relevance of new information that Reed’s lawyers insist points to another man as the killer.
The issue is now in the hands of Visiting Judge Doug Shaver, who will forward written recommendations to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which will have the final say on whether Reed gets a new trial in the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites.
Shaver said he will need six to eight weeks to work on his findings. With about a month needed to compile a written record of the hearing, lawyers said they did not expect to see Shaver’s findings until January.
The hearing focused on state-
ments attributed to Stites’ fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, who defense lawyers say is the more likely suspect in the strangulation death of Stites.
The statements, when combined with recently developed forensic evidence, would explode the prosecution theory that Reed killed Stites between 3 and 3:30 a.m. on April 23, 1996, as she drove to her job at a Bastrop grocery store, defense lawyers argued.
Instead, they argued, new evidence shows Stites was killed before midnight, making Fennell the only likely suspect.
But prosecutor Matthew Ottoway, with the state attorney general’s office, told Shaver that the case against Reed remains strong.
Stites was killed while wearing her work clothes, her pickup was found abandoned in an area where Reed was known to roam, his saliva and semen were found on her body and there were signs she had been raped, he said, adding that Stites had a good relationship with Fennell and had begun paying off her wedding gown shortly before her death.
Stites’ body also had bruises from the seat belt in the pickup, and her earring and shoe were found inside, indicating she was attacked in the vehicle, not elsewhere as defense lawyers suggest, Ottoway said.
Reed was granted the hearing to explore an interview Curtis Davis, who described himself as Fennell’s best friend, gave last year to CNN in which he recalled Fennell saying he went out drinking and returned to the Giddings apartment he shared with Stites after she had fallen asleep.
Fennell, who declined to testify at the hearing, had told investigators that he returned to the apartment around 8 p.m. and was with Stites until she left for work around 3 a.m.
Reed’s lawyers argued that trial prosecutors had a duty to disclose the conversation between Davis and Fennell, which took place the day Stites’ body was found along a rural road in Bastrop, because Davis was a Bastrop County sheriff ’s deputy at the time of Reed’s trial, and failure to share the information severely hampered Reed’s defense and violated his constitutional rights.
“If the state had fulfilled its constitutional obligations, Mr. Reed’s lawyers, they would have bored down on that if they had known about the discrepancy in statements,” defense lawyer Andrew MacRae of Austin told the judge.
“Deny them the fruits of their corruption,” MacRae said during closing arguments. “Let’s try this case with all the evidence, not just the evidence the state feels like giving us.”
Ottoway argued that Reed’s lawyers failed to make a case.
Davis, who testified Tuesday, lacked credibility because he could not recall details of his conversation with Fennell or his interview with CNN, Ottoway said.
In addition, he said, Davis was not part of the team investigating the Stites murder.
The prosecutor also pointed to Friday’s testimony by Carol Stites, the victim’s mother, who lived in a Giddings apartment below the one shared by her daughter and Fennell. Carol Stites said Fennell returned home April 22 around dusk, which occurred between 8 and 8:30 p.m.
“There is no credible evidence that Jimmy Fennell arrived at home anytime later than what he testified to at trial,” Ottoway told the judge.
But Bryce Benjet, a defense lawyer with the Innocence Project of New York, said after the hearing that the controversy over Fennell’s statements allowed him to introduce important testimony by Dr. Michael Baden, a renowned forensic pathologist who concluded that Stites had been killed before midnight.
“The forensic evidence makes it scientifically and medically impossible for Rodney Reed to have committed this crime,” Benjet said. “We are confident that the court will know that the wrong man was convicted.”