Inmate granted a stay of execution
Court decision follows rare bipartisan outcry on behalf of prisoner
The death penalty case of Rodney Reed took a turn in his favor Friday as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed his execution and sent the case back to the trial court for further review.
The 51-year-old Reed was previously set for lethal injection Wednesday evening for the 1996 killing of 19-year-old Stacey Stites.
More executions have taken place in Texas than any other state in recent years — and yet Reed’s case has captured the attention of celebrities and politicians from both sides of the aisle.
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian visited him Friday for two hours on death row.
But what is it about this case that’s caused not just big-name celebrities including Beyoncé and Oprah but also conservatives such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to ask that officials take more time to review it?
And not just that — bipartisan groups of state lawmakers have also urged Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to grant Reed a reprieve. The Polk County Republican Party earlier this month passed a resolution in support of clemency.
This type of widespread bipartisan outcry is unprecedented, experts said.
“When you see conservative supporters of capital punishment seeking to intervene, that’s really unusual,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “That almost never happens.”
Reed was convicted of raping and strangling Stites while she made her way to work at a supermarket in Bastrop, a rural community about 30 miles southeast of Austin.
Reed has long maintained that Stites was killed by her fiancé, former police officer Jimmy Fennell. Reed says Fennell was angry because Stites, who was white, was having an affair with Reed, who is black.
In recent weeks, Reed’s attorneys have presented affidavits that support his claims, including one by a former prison inmate who claims Fennell bragged about killing Stites and referred to Reed using a racial slur.
Arthur Snow, who was in the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood when he served time in prison with Fennell, said Fennell spoke of Stites “with a lot of hatred and resentment” because she had an affair with a black man. That conversation happened in about 2010, Snow said.
Fennell’s attorney has said his client didn’t kill Stites. Fennell was paroled last year after serving time in prison for sexual assault in an unrelated case.
Prosecutors say Reed’s semen was found in the victim, his claims of an affair with Stites were not proven at trial, Fennell was cleared as a suspect and Reed had a history of committing other sexual assaults.
Reed’s lawyers say his conviction was based on flawed evidence. They have denied the other sexual assault accusations made by prosecutors.
Among the reasons the court ruled in Reed’s favor were the inclusion of false testimony in his previous case as well as so-called
Brady violations, referring to potentially exculpatory evidence that was not disclosed to his defense team.
‘Railroaded to his death’
For many, the facts of the case hark back to an era when a similar situation could have led to a black man’s lynching.
“You’ve got an African American man being sentenced to death and being moved toward execution for having a consensual relationship with a white woman who was having an affair,” Dunham said. “If nobody does anything — if all of the people in power who have an opportunity to do something all do nothing — it will have an appearance of government looking the other way while a black man is being railroaded to his death.”
Keith Hampton, a defense attorney who represented death row inmate Thomas Whitaker — whom Abbott granted a rare commutation last year — said the Reed case comes as America is going through a reckoning over race and the effects of racial bias.
It also touches on one of the day’s most prominent social issues: the treatment of black people, especially men, by police, he said.
“The core story or drama or whatever you want to call it … is immediately understandable by everybody,” Hampton said. “You just say, ‘Black guy having an affair, white woman, with a racist, white cop who is violent himself to women, and the black guy gets the needle.’ ”
The drama of a secret affair, increased public confidence in DNA testing and the many irregularities in the way the case has been handled also add to the “off-the-scale attention” the case has received. “It has it all,” he said.
Hampton, who also represented Kenneth Foster, another Texas death row inmate, said Foster’s case also garnered a lot of attention — but nothing like Reed’s.
“I didn’t have cops rooting for Kenneth,” Hampton said. “I didn’t have lawmakers, and the lawmakers I did have were from Australia and Europe.”
‘Glaring problem’
Patrick McCann, a Houston defense lawyer with expertise in capital appeals, attributed the attention to another reason entirely, saying he didn’t think the facts of the case are all that unique. Instead, he credits the advocacy of Reed’s family and his lawyers and their “very successful national media campaign.”
“My sadness is not for them,” McCann said of Reed’s family. “They’ve done an excellent job in this case. My sadness is that it takes this kind of effort to get attention to the glaring problem with the Texas death penalty.”