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Texas plans to execute a man who says DNA evidence could exonerate him
TEXAS'S DEATH-PENALTY machinery is humming. Last year, the state carried out more than half of America's executions. So far this year, six out of 15 have been carried out in the state and that share will increase. A further nine inmates on death row are slated to die in Texas in 2019. After the execution set for September 25th of Robert Sparks—who in 2007 confessed to fatally stabbing his wife and two step-sons and raping his step-daughters—four executions are scheduled for October, three for November and one in December.
On November 20th it will be the turn of Rodney Reed, a 51-year-old black man who was found guilty of killing Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old white woman, in 1996. Mr Reed has been on Texas’s crowded death row since 1998. At the trial, the main evidence connecting Mr Reed to the crime was strands of his DNA found inside Ms Stites’s body. Mr Reed said he had been having an affair with Ms Stites at the time of her death—and that he had sex with her the day before she was found strangled with her own woven leather belt on the side of a country road in Bastrop County, Texas.
No evidence put Mr Reed at the scene of the crime. Nor were there any eyewitnesses implicating him. Instead, prosecutors relied on Mr Reed’s semen found in a vaginal swab and presented this to jurors as the “smoking gun”. But Mr Reed and his legal team—including lawyers from the Innocence Project, an organisation dedicated to freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners and, in capital cases, fighting against their executions—argue that the trial was marred by unexamined evidence and false scientific claims. They argue that Jimmy Fennell, Ms Stites’s fiancé and a police officer at the time, should have been more closely investigated. Mr Fennell, who has denied involvement in Ms Stites’s death, was the primary suspect in the case for more than a year before suspicions turned to Mr Reed.
In a complaint filed in August—the latest in a series stretching back years—Mr Reed’s lawyers describe waffling in Mr Fennell’s testimony, his two failed polygraph tests and the “unusual” actions he took, including ditching his truck and closing his bank account while his fiancé was still missing. Before she died, it was claimed that Mr Fennell had been heard saying that he would kill Ms Stites by strangling her with a belt if she ever cheated on him. A decade later, Mr Fennell served a decade in prison for abducting and raping a young woman.
On November 20th it will be the turn of Rodney Reed, a 51-year-old black man who was found guilty of killing Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old white woman, in 1996. Mr Reed has been on Texas’s crowded death row since 1998. At the trial, the main evidence connecting Mr Reed to the crime was strands of his DNA found inside Ms Stites’s body. Mr Reed said he had been having an affair with Ms Stites at the time of her death—and that he had sex with her the day before she was found strangled with her own woven leather belt on the side of a country road in Bastrop County, Texas.
No evidence put Mr Reed at the scene of the crime. Nor were there any eyewitnesses implicating him. Instead, prosecutors relied on Mr Reed’s semen found in a vaginal swab and presented this to jurors as the “smoking gun”. But Mr Reed and his legal team—including lawyers from the Innocence Project, an organisation dedicated to freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners and, in capital cases, fighting against their executions—argue that the trial was marred by unexamined evidence and false scientific claims. They argue that Jimmy Fennell, Ms Stites’s fiancé and a police officer at the time, should have been more closely investigated. Mr Fennell, who has denied involvement in Ms Stites’s death, was the primary suspect in the case for more than a year before suspicions turned to Mr Reed.
In a complaint filed in August—the latest in a series stretching back years—Mr Reed’s lawyers describe waffling in Mr Fennell’s testimony, his two failed polygraph tests and the “unusual” actions he took, including ditching his truck and closing his bank account while his fiancé was still missing. Before she died, it was claimed that Mr Fennell had been heard saying that he would kill Ms Stites by strangling her with a belt if she ever cheated on him. A decade later, Mr Fennell served a decade in prison for abducting and raping a young woman.
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2019/09/23/texas-plans-to-execute-a-man-who-says-dna-evidence-could-exonerate-him
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