Texas plans to execute a man who says DNA evidence could exonerate him
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Texas 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.
Mr Reed’s lawyers also observe that key testimony from a forensic scientist attesting to the timeline of Ms Stites’s death was later found (by the scientist’s admission) to be false and that eye witnesses had seen Mr Reed and Ms Stites together “at various times prior to her murder”, apparently supporting his claim that they had been in a relationship. All of this may cast doubt on the validity of Mr Reed’s conviction, but none of it proves his innocence.
For years, Mr Reed’s lawyers have been arguing that their client should get a new trial in which additional evidence—including DNA analysis of previously overlooked crime-scene items—could be introduced. During the original trial, neither Ms Stites’s clothing nor the murder weapon, the belt, was analysed for genetic material. But these garments and objects remain safely stored, have not been tampered with or compromised and could, plausibly, if tested, exonerate Mr Reed. In 2017, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas refused to order post-conviction DNA analysis because Mr Reed did not prove that “exculpatory DNA results would have resulted in his acquittal”. This June, the same court denied a similar request.
With avenues in state courts thus closed mere months before Mr Reed’s execution date, his lawyers’ latest attempt to get a federal court to order a new trial invokes both civil-rights law and the federal constitution.
Denying Mr Reed a chance to prove his innocence, the complaint says, violates Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 affording individuals a hook for a lawsuit when states deny them constitutional rights. And there are a host of rights at stake, according to the complaint: Mr Reed’s right to due process, to be protected from cruel and unusual punishments, to access courts and to prove his innocence.
Mr Reed’s case has attracted national attention, including that of Sister Helen Prejean, an activist opposing the death penalty who wrote “Dead Man Walking”, a 1993 book that inspired a film of the same name two years later. Sister Prejean visited Mr Reed’s family upon his previous execution date in 2015 and has served as an informal advocate. She recently tweeted that Texas seeks to execute him “even though several items from the crime scene—including the murder weapon—were never tested for DNA”.
By any measure, the death penalty in America is in decline. Last year, 25 prisoners were put to death in eight states, down from a peak of 98 executions across 20 states in 1999. The number of death sentences is falling, too: in 2018, only 42 people were sent to death row compared to some 300 in the mid-1990s. Popular support for capital punishment has dwindled along with executions. In 1994, 80% of Americans approved of the death penalty for murder; last year, 56% did. Although William Barr, the attorney-general, announced in July that the federal government would resume executions of those sentenced to death for federal crimes—five are on the calendar for December and January, the first since 2003—capital punishment is an option in fewer and fewer states. In the past three years state courts have struck down the death penalty in Delaware and Washington; California’s governor imposed a moratorium in March; and in May, the New Hampshire legislature voted to abolish it.
This retreat has been prompted by a number of factors including capital punishment’s exorbitant cost. But the most distressing flaw of capital punishment is well illustrated by the uncertainties in Mr Reed’s story: the risk that the state may execute innocent people.
Source: Economist
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