Growing public pressure for stay of execution
IN HIS five years as Texas governor, Republican Greg Abbott has overseen the execution of nearly 50 prisoners while only once sparing a condemned man’s life.
But Abbott – who has proudly referred to the death penalty as “Texas justice” – has never confronted such intense pressure to halt a lethal injection as he is facing in the case of Rodney Reed, who is set to die this month for a 1996 killing despite new evidence that even a growing number of Republican legislators say raises serious questions about his guilt.
On Saturday, supporters of Reed held their biggest protest yet outside the governor’s mansion.
“Only thing I would tell him is, honestly, just look at the evidence,” said Rodrick Reed, Rodney’s brother.
It’s unclear if the public pressure is making any impression on Abbott, who was a law and order state attorney-general before he was elected governor.
Abbott hasn’t spoken publicly about Reed’s case. Even Republican lawmakers who are close to the governor and have lobbied his office in recent days and weeks for a reprieve say they’re in the dark about his thinking.
“They said the governor has heard about it and is taking a very deliberative and thoughtful analysis,” Republican state Representative Matt Krause said. “But they didn’t give me an indication one way or the other on which way he’d go.”
Reed, now 51, was convicted of raping and strangling 19-year-old Stacy Stites while she made her way to work at a supermarket in Bastrop, a rural community 50km south-east 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 by a racial slur.
Reed’s lawyers say other recent affidavits also corroborate the relationship between Stites and Reed. Fennell’s attorney has said his client didn’t kill Stites, and prosecutors maintain that they believe Reed is guilty.
It’s not the first time Abbott’s decision-making has been in the spotlight over a high-profile death penalty case.
While serving as Texas’s attorney-general in 2011, Abbott ruled that a state forensic panel could not consider old evidence in the case against Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed for a fire that killed his children, but whose guilt remained in question after his death because the arson science used to convict him has since been debunked.
In a letter to Abbott this week, more than a dozen Republicans said getting it wrong with Reed could “erode public trust – not only in capital punishment, but in Texas justice itself”.
“A lot of evidence deserves to be vetted,” said Republican state Representative James White.