Bastrop County man slated for execution
A Bastrop County man who has long professed his innocence in a controversial capital murder case is scheduled for execution after more than two decades on Texas’ death row.
Rodney Reed, who was convicted of raping and killing 19year-old Stacey Stites, is slated to die by lethal injection Nov. 20, a prison spokesman confirmed Thursday.
The local judge’s decision to greenlight the new execution — Reed’s second in the past five years — comes amid controversy about the timing of the state’s request for a new death date. One day earlier, the Bastrop Advertiser published a story about a protest held by Reed’s family in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“My brother is truly innocent and all the evidence proves that,” Reed’s brother Rodrick told the paper. “This fight is nowhere near over.”
When prosecutors filed their execution request the following day, Reed’s attorneys alleged it was in retaliation for the protest. Neither defense attorneys nor the Bastrop County District Attorney’s Office responded Thursday to the Chronicle’s request for comment.
The now-52-year-old California native was sent to death row in 1998, two years after Stites’ slaying. According to the state’s theory of the case presented at trial, Reed abducted the teen around 3:30 a.m. on an April morning in 1996.
Prosecutors relied on testimony from a trio of forensic experts to show the presence of intact sperm on the slain woman’s body was proof she’d had sex within the past 26 hours. That ruled out Reed’s defense that he’d had consensual sex with her days earlier.
In the years since Reed’s conviction, all three experts have backed away from the conclusions in their testimony. That fact — along with questions about the time of death and evidence allegedly implicating another man — has bolstered Reed’s appeals and energized his supporters.
But the courts have not sided with him, and in June the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected his latest claim, though he could take the matter up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
He is among more than 10 Texas men with execution dates set this year. The next on the calendar is Dexter Johnson, a braindamaged multiple killer from Houston who’s scheduled to die Aug. 15.