Rodney Reed

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Rodney Reed (born December 22, 1967) is a Texas Death Row inmate. Rodney Reed, an African-American man from Bastrop County, Texas, who is currently on death row for the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites, 17, a white woman, waits on a decision from Bastrop County Judge Reva Towslee Corbett, the daughter of the judge who presided over Reed’s original trial and conviction, on new evidence presented at an evidentiary hearing in March. In October of 2005, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, in what has been called “a rare move,” ordered the case back to the trial court to determine whether the prosecutor's conduct—the hiding of evidence that suggested Reed's innocence—violated Reed’s constitutional rights.

The state’s case against Reed, who has maintained his innocence since his arrest for the crime, relied on a single piece of evidence: semen matched to Reed found in on Stites’ body. Reed, who was in jail on cocaine charges when questioned and had been previously been accused of and tried for rape, denied ever knowing Stites and signed a statement to that effect. However, during his trial Reed explained the DNA evidence in the Stites case by claiming he had an affair with her. The affair was kept quiet, Reed says, because he is black and Stites is white, and also because Stites' fiancé, Jimmy Fennell Jr., was a Giddings police officer. Reed testified he had sex with Stites during the early hours of April 22, a full day before her murder. However, Travis County Medical Examiner Dr. Roberto Bayardo testified that the recovered semen had been deposited recently, thus contradicting Reed's testimony. Reed claimed he denied knowing Stites during questioning because he felt unsafe admitting to the affair.

Reed's defenders posed an alternative theory. They claimed Fennell found out about the affair and murdered Stites. This theory is supported by a number of pieces of evidence. One is a state police report analyzing DNA taken from two beer cans found near Stites' body; the report excludes Reed but does not exclude two other men — police officers and friends of Fennell. This lab report was never provided to the Reed's defense prior to or during his trial. An appellate judge later ruled that not giving the beer can evidence to the defense was not sufficient to warrant a new trial. Aside from Reed's semen, and despite the brutal nature of the killing, there was also a lack of other physical evidence tying him to the crime scene. There were also no witnesses who could place Reed anywhere near the time and place of the crime scene.

Reed’s defense maintains that prosecutors hid evidence, including two eye witnesses and DNA found at the scene of the crime that implicated Stites’ fiancé Jimmy Fennell, who at the time was a police officer in the small Bastrop County town of Giddings.

At the March evidentiary hearing, two witnesses offered testimony that seemed to shift the onus of suspicion off Reed. The first, Martha Barnett, testified that she saw Stites and Fennell at a convenience store parking lot around 5 am. The two appeared to be arguing. This places Stites alive, with her fiance, two hours after the prosecution’s theory holds Reed killed her.

The second, Mary Blackwell, a police officer in the Dallas area, testified that she was a member of the same police academy class as Fennell. She told the court that she remembers that Fennell remarked to several class members he would kill his girlfriend by strangling her if he was ever to find that she had cheated on him. When asked how he would make sure his fingerprints could not be lifted from her neck, Blackwell testified that Fennell said he would use a belt. Stites was found strangled with a belt.

Both of these witnesses testified that they made this information known to the Bastrop County District Attorney’s office through their own representation during Reed’s trial. The office categorically denies this, claiming no one in their office knew of the witnesses until after Reed had been convicted and sentenced to death.

Reed is the subject of the documentary film State vs. Reed, produced by Frank Bustoz and Ryan Polomski. Partly as a result of this film, publicity in the Austin Chronicle, and efforts by such groups as Amnesty International, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and Texas Students Against the Death Penalty, Reed recently had a hearing to determine if he is eligible for a retrial.