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Rodney Reed denied DNA testing


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On June 25, 2018, the United States Supreme Court denied a cert petition by Rodney Reedasking the Court to review a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decision denying Reed access to DNA testing that could prove that he is innocent of the murder of Stacey Stites for which Reed has served more than 20 years on death row.

Send Rodney Reed a message of support

The following statement can be attributed to Innocence Project Senior Staff Attorney Bryce Benjet:

Rodney Reed has asked for DNA testing of crime scene evidence that would unquestionably have been tested if the murder were investigated today. Because such testing can provide dispositive proof of Mr. Reed’s innocence, the denial of DNA testing by the Texas courts violates fundamental constitutional norms.

Today, the United States Supreme Court declined to directly review the denial of DNA testing by the Texas courts. Although we had hoped that the Supreme Court would immediately take up the constitutional issues raised by the denial of DNA testing, we are also aware that the Court has recognized a separate procedure for federal review of DNA cases through a civil action brought in the United States District Court.  We intend to pursue this remedy in the federal courts so that this important evidence can finally be tested.

In the 20 years since Mr. Reed’s trial, we have discovered substantial evidence that both exonerates Mr. Reed and implicates Ms. Stites’s fiance, Jimmy Fennell, as the murderer.  The nation’s leading forensic experts have reviewed this case and determined that the State’s theory of Mr. Reed’s guilt is scientifically and medically impossible.  The State’s key forensic witness, Roberto Bayardo, M.D., has recanted his opinion linking Mr. Reed to the murder.  New witnesses have come forward, including Ms. Stites’s own cousin, who were aware that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites were romantically involved. And while Fennell was a suspect all along, his best friend at the time, Bastrop Sheriff’s Officer Curtis Davis, has now revealed that Fennell gave an inconsistent account of where he was on the night of the murder.  When asked to explain this discrepancy, Fennell declined to testify because his answers might further incriminate him.

Texas has been at the forefront of criminal justice reform and leads the nation in DNA exonerations. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals continues to interpret the DNA law in a restrictive and unconstitutional manner. The Texas Legislature has repeatedly corrected the Court of Criminal Appeals by amending the DNA law, and we are confident that the Legislature will again express their overwhelming support for DNA testing to ensure that innocent men and women are not wrongfully imprisoned or executed. In the meantime, we will certainly seek all available redress in the federal courts.

https://www.innocenceproject.org/innocence-project-responds-to-supreme-court-denial-of-cert-petition-in-case-of-rodney-reed/

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1 hour ago, Hellraiser97 said:

Why did SCOTUS deny this? 
 

"Today, the United States Supreme Court declined to directly review the denial of DNA testing by the Texas courts. Although we had hoped that the Supreme Court would immediately take up the constitutional issues raised by the denial of DNA testing, we are also aware that the Court has recognized a separate procedure for federal review of DNA cases through a civil action brought in the United States District Court.  We intend to pursue this remedy in the federal courts so that this important evidence can finally be tested."

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No one really knows exactly why the Supreme Court doesn't review anything.  This is what grants and denials of certiorari look like, see pp. 3-4.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/062518zor_g3bh.pdf

However, realize that the Supreme Court doesn't exist to correct the errors of lower courts, particularly if those errors are of a factual or evidentiary nature. 

 

Note that this is an appeal of the highest criminal court of the State of Texas.  It is fairly uncommon for the Supreme Court to review a state-court case.  Only if a state statute, not a state court decision, is potentially unconstitutional will the Supreme Court review a decision of the state courts.  Here, I imagine there's nothing wrong with the Texas courts' procedures, just the stingy-ass, factual basis for the Court of Criminal Appeals' decision.

 

There are other vehicles for review, namely writs of habeus corpus in the federal courts, which is how most state-court criminal procedure constitutional questions reach the Supreme Court, and, as mentioned in the article, the defendant has a civil case for violation of his civil rights, apparently,  https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08scotus.html     In habeus corpus, the federal courts can consider an unconstitutional outcome based on something other than an unconstitutional law or statute.

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On ‎6‎/‎30‎/‎2018 at 12:08 PM, Chopper said:

The Rodney Reed conviction is a grotesque miscarriage of justice. I'm certain there are a few people still living in Bastrop County who deserve a little retribution. 

They can start with Jade Helm.

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The courts of appeals of this state,  and in particular the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, are rubber stamps. There is no meaningful review, and they stretch the bounds of logic, ignore the law, disregard facts, assume error was harmless....whatever it takes to affirm a conviction. Or reverse a trial court’s pretrial ruling in favor of the defendant.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/06/26/in-americas-leading-death-penalty-county-judges-routinely-outsource-their-written-opinions-to-prosecutors/

 

 

In America’s leading death-penalty county, judges routinely outsource their written opinions to prosecutors

 
 
 
GJZGISILEE5XZN73AYVQUJXHQA.jpg
Alfred Dewayne Brown, left, seated next to defense attorney Robert Morrow, right, in 2005. (Jessica Kourkounis/Houston Chronicle via AP)

There are a few enduring and pernicious myths about the death penalty in the United States. One is that execution is reserved for the “worst of the worst,” only the most culpable and only those for which there is overwhelming evidence of guilt. We now know that this isn’t true. When it comes to culpability, for example, we’ve executed people who were mentally ill, who didn’t directly commit the murder for which they were convicted or who were the unlucky person against whom co-conspirators testified in exchange for a plea bargain. As of last month, the United States had executed 1,476 since 1976. Meanwhile, 162 death row inmates have been exonerated. Which is to say that of every nine people we’ve executed, a fellow death row inmate was wrongly convicted. In most cases, it took DNA testing to prevent the execution. In other words, we don’t merely execute those for whom there is overwhelming evidence of guilt.

Another misperception that goes hand in hand with this one is that the criminal-justice system takes these cases very seriously. As former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in a 1993 opinion, “Our society has a high degree of confidence in its criminal trials, in no small part because the Constitution offers unparalleled protections against convicting the innocent.” (To be fair, O’Connor has since changed her mind a bit.) It’s easy to see why people would assume as much. Given the stakes, one can only hopethat prosecutors exercise great care and caution in seeking capital cases; that death-penalty defendants are afforded quality legal defense as well as funds to hire their own investigators and expert witnesses; and that judges bend over backward to be impartial, to ensure that these trials are fair, and to give defendants the benefit of any doubts. We want to think that appeals courts carefully review these cases and hold trial judges, prosecutors and even juries to the highest standards.

Of course, we know this isn’t true, either. We know that attorneys for death-penalty defendants have shown up at court drunk. We know they’ve been caught sleeping during trials. We know that judges have assigned capital cases to attorneys with little or no experience, or with long disciplinary records. We know that prosecutors routinely hide exculpatory evidence. And we know that appeals courts are woefully bad at oversight. Moreover, we know that, thanks to Congress, federal appeals courts routinely rule against capital defendants based on procedural issues, not on substantive matters such as guilt or innocence, justice, or whether their convictions were constitutional. Tellingly, a 2008 study of the first 200 DNA exonerations by University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett found that in 86 percent of those cases, the defendant never received any appellate relief before DNA testing. In a third of the cases, appeals courts dismissed the errors committed by prosecutors, judges or defense attorneys before or during the trial as “harmless,” then cited the other evidence of guilt in upholding the conviction. In more than 10 percent of cases, at least one appeals court majority described the evidence of the defendant’s guilt as “overwhelming.” (Remember that all of these people were proven innocent by DNA testing.)

All of which brings me to a study of death-penalty cases in Harris County, Tex., recently published in the Houston Law Review. (Thanks to the Open File blog for pointing the study out.)

Specifically, the study looked at how Texas’s trial courts handled post-conviction review of these cases. The term “post-conviction” refers to the period after a defendant has exhausted his or her initial appeal. The bar for a new trial during post-conviction is much higher. But in most states, it’s only during post-conviction that defense attorneys will get access to the state’s entire file about a case. If there’s exculpatory evidence that was never turned over before trial, it’s usually at this stage that they’ll find it. Recognizing the importance of post-conviction review, the federal courts have also required states to support well-funded offices of post-conviction to represent people on death row. These offices tend to be staffed with more experienced and qualified attorneys who are less overworked than the typical public defender in a capital case. They’re also more likely to have funding to hire independent investigators and expert witnesses. This, too, is why we tend not to learn about misconduct and deficiencies in a death penalty trial until post-conviction. The performance of the defendant’s trial attorney also often isn’t reviewed by an independent defense attorney until the case moves to post-conviction.

So let’s get back to that Houston study. Once in post-conviction, a defendant’s attorneys first file a petition with the trial judge laying out the new evidence. The trial judge then makes a determination of whether that new evidence merits a new trial. The trial judge’s findings are immensely important. They’re granted enormous deference by state appellate courts, and federal law requires federal appeals courts to grant enormous deference to the states.

Given all of this, we should hope that Texas’s courts treat post-conviction petitions from people on death row with a great amount of reverence and care. The study found that this just isn’t the case. The authors found so many problems, in fact, that they argue it raises questions about whether the state’s habeas process “is genuinely adversarial.” The study found that in an “overwhelming number” of cases, the trial courts didn’t bother holding an evidentiary hearing to resolve any discrepancies in facts between the state and the defense. They found that the courts showed “extreme deference” to the prosecution, and often adopted the state’s position on every single claim, even when contradicted by the record. For example, the study found 191 cases in which a defendant’s post-conviction petition alleged clear disputes of fact with the state.

In these cases, Harris County post-conviction prosecutors have authored and proposed 21,275 separate findings of fact and conclusions of law, and the Harris County courts have adopted 20,261 of the prosecutors’ proposed findings verbatim: an adoption rate of 95 percent. In fact, judges in Harris County have adopted all of the prosecutors’ findings verbatim in 183 out of 191 sets of findings, or 96 percent.

So in 96 percent of these cases, the judge sided with the state on every single case. And if you tally up all the disputed facts in all 191 cases —  the courts sided with prosecutors on 95 percent of them.

Some other findings from the Texas study:

  • Of 40 state judges for which the authors could obtain reliable data, 34 (85 percent) “in every instance . . . adopted every single finding of fact and conclusion of law proposed by the state verbatim.”
  • At least eight courts in Harris County have accepted the state’s version of every disputed fact verbatim in every death penalty case since 1995. Note that the point here isn’t that these courts sided with the state in every death penalty appeal. It’s that for every disputed fact of every death penalty case, they accepted the state’s version, word for word.

Here’s the most jaw-dropping part: In 167 of the 191 cases, “the judges simply signed the state’s proposed document without changing the heading.” Which is to say, the judges essentially let the prosecutors write their opinion for them.

Moreover, there’s little evidence that the judges even read these opinions before signing their name to them. From the study:

Where the state does file an unsigned copy with the court, the intervals between filing and signing of the state’s proposed findings are often very brief (sometimes within a single day), even in cases with over a hundred proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law involving extensive factual disputes. Buried in the original district clerk’s files are handwritten notes, some on yellow Post-its, evidencing ex parte communications between post-conviction prosecutors and the presiding judges. Misspellings, misnumberings, and other typographical errors are present throughout rubber-stamped orders, suggesting that the court had not reviewed the document before signing and adopting the state-authored findings in their entirety.

Even when judges did more than merely sign their names, their changes to the prosecutors’ briefs were often perfunctory, such as changing a heading or changing the order of the findings. Below the headings, the legal arguments were word for word. The authors of the study concluded that of the 185 written opinions in which a Harris County court judge denied a post-conviction petition, the judge had actually written his or her own opinion in just two. That amounts to 2 percent.

It isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Back in 2016, I wrote about Alabama death row inmate Doyle Lee Hamm. The man’s attorneys had requested a new sentencing hearing after presenting new evidence of mitigating factors that his trial attorney had failed to discover. In response, prosecutors filed an 89-page “Proposed Memorandum Opinion.” One business day later, the judge issue his ruling. The opinion was merely a reproduction of the prosecutor’s document, only with the judge’s signature. The judge hadn’t even bothered to delete the word proposed. Hamm’s conviction and sentence stood. (Last February, Hamm’s execution was called off after prison officials spent more than two-and-a-half hours trying to execute him. Hamm’s advanced cancer and years of drug use had made it impossible for them to find a usable vein for the lethal injection cocktail. The state has since agreed to not try to attempt to execute him again.)

As Andrew Cohen reported at the Marshall Project in 2016, in Alabama too, this practice of judges putting their names on opinions written by prosecutors was common. According to a 2003 study, prosecutors had written at least one judicial opinion in 17 of 20 recent death penalty cases.

At risk of stating the obvious, that these judges can’t even bother to write original opinions in death penalty cases is a pretty good indication that they didn’t spend much time contemplating the arguments and issues at stake. Most of us were taught in grade school that it’s wrong to put your name on someone else’s work. Even if the person whose work you’re claiming doesn’t mind, it means you didn’t bother doing the work yourself. This remains true through high school and college, where claiming someone else’s work as your own is, of course, called plagiarism. It’s a cardinal sin in journalism and academia.

Of course, plagiarism is usually committed without the consent of the plagiarized, but even if an original author has for some reason agreed to let someone else falsely claim credit for his or her work, we don’t let the plagiarizer off the hook. Again, it isn’t just about stealing work. It’s about about falsely claiming to have intellectually engaged with the material.

This assurance that the person whose name is on the work has done the intellectual heavy lifting is especially important in court cases because again, a trial judge’s findings on disputed facts are given enormous deference by the appellate courts. They assume these opinions were written after careful analysis and thoughtful consideration — or at least they pretend to.

Here’s one more kicker: Want to guess what county has executed more people since 1976 than any other county in the United States?

Yes. It’s Harris County, Tex. The county was also featured in a recent report by the Fair Punishment Project for its high proportion of death-penalty cases with prosecutorial misconduct, its inadequate public defense in capital cases and the disproportionately high percentage of people of color sent to death row. It’s the county where a former district attorney — whose office sent 40 people to death row — had to resign after he was caught sending racist jokes over email. It’s the county where defense lawyers have notoriously fallen asleep during death-penalty trials. One single defense attorney has, by himself, handled 20 percent of the county’s death penalty cases since 2006. Since 1975, three people condemned to die in Harris County were later exonerated. That includes the recent exoneration of Alfred Dewayne Brown, who was indicted and convicted after the foreman of a grand jury — who was also a police officer — threatened Brown’s alibi witness with criminal charges and the loss of her children until she changed her testimony. Brown was later exonerated when phone records confirming his alibi were found in the garage of a police officer.

This is the system that the county’s judges continued to defend and rule in favor of, usually without bothering to take the time to write their own opinions.

In the end, it seems that signing your name to someone else’s work is frowned upon in most every intellectual arena except for judicial opinions, in which someone’s life or freedom is at stake. And that says quite a bit about how seriously we take the death penalty in the United States.

 

 

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  • 1 year later...

So I did a search and this was the only thread I could find. Looks like we're gonna execute an innocent man on November 20th. This is awful. I'm gonna make the calls to all the officials tomorrow but they'll go through with it because they're gutless twats afraid to admit that mistakes can be made in criminal justice. I just can't fathom what that man is going through.

https://www.innocenceproject.org/stand-with-rodney-reed-on-texas-death-row/

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I know several (typical bleeding heart liberal) journalists who've looked into this case in depth, thinking they were going to write stories that would help free an innocent man and win them awards, etc, but those stories have never come out, because in every case those writers came to the conclusion that Reed is guilty before they ever turned in even a rough draft to an editor.

Please look at both sides of the evidence here and don't base your conclusions on the "Reed is Innocent" side alone. 

 

Edited by MaybeACoordinator
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14 minutes ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

I know several (typical bleeding heart liberal) journalists who've looked into this case in depth, thinking they were going to write stories that would help free an innocent man and win them awards, etc, but those stories have never come out, because in every case those writers came to the conclusion that Reed is guilty before they ever turned in even a rough draft to an editor.

Please look at both sides of the evidence here and don't base your conclusions on the "Reed is Innocent" side alone. 

 

Sure. Can you post a link to the evidence? There is DNA evidence that can be tested that could potentially quiet down all the typical bleeding heart liberals who don't want the state to execute a potentially innocent man on our behalf. Why not stay the execution and process the DNA? 

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10 minutes ago, immortal13 said:

Amen. Hell I would chip in on the cost, an no doubt plenty of others would do the same. Just test the fucking evidence before ending this guy's life. A lot of this nonsense seems to me to be more about the state's reluctance to giving up the "W".

and that's unfortunately what it is all about. we closed the case, we got a guilty, we don't want ot find the real guy who did it, or at least confirm that his is the guy.

why wouldn't you want to confirm you got the right guy?

because you don't care about the right guy. just the guilty verdict.

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Read this and the back and forth in the comments. Corcoran got obsessed with this case and covered it on his own after he'd left the Statesman and Texas Monthly; hence the link to his personal blog.

Not many people seem to have heard from Reed's half dozen or so previous rape victims, one of whom was 12 at the time he savagely attacked her.

Yes, that's immaterial in this case, whose merits you have to judge on their own, but Corcoran presents a tough case both against Reed and the possibility it was really cop boyfriend who did it. 

I really don't care if Reed is put to death or not but I damn sure don't want him back on the streets, ever. 

 

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40 minutes ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

I know several (typical bleeding heart liberal) journalists who've looked into this case in depth, thinking they were going to write stories that would help free an innocent man and win them awards, etc, but those stories have never come out, because in every case those writers came to the conclusion that Reed is guilty before they ever turned in even a rough draft to an editor.

Please look at both sides of the evidence here and don't base your conclusions on the "Reed is Innocent" side alone. 

 

Please provide that evidence that made them conclude he was guilty. Not being a smartass, but I'd like to know exactly what proves he deserves to die.

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54 minutes ago, bschoolprof said:

 https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4345166/Rodney-Reed-Shaver-Findings.pdf. He did not find this evidence compelling (I did not either).   

Just for illustrative purposes, this document is the type that is discussed in post 11 as being drafted by the prosecution and adopted, in most cases wholly, by the trial court judge.

To a certain extent, having the winner draft the findings and conclusions makes sense.  In federal court, when there's a bench civil trial, both parties draft their own findings and conclusions and submit them to the court.  The judge goes over them and picks and chooses the ones that supports his ultimate ruling, and usually adds a few of his own. That seems pretty fair. 

In this context, though, it happens after a jury's verdict and explains why the judge denies a new trial, usually after it is denied.   That they are adopted wholesale is disturbing but not terribly surprising.  Even when only the winner drafts, it doesn't necessarily behoove them to "overdo it" for appeals purposes.  But it's a little stinky because a sharp prosecutor can draft them to resist appellate review.

The counter to all this hand-wringing about refusing to do a relatively small thing like review DNA evidence is that once you rule that it's permissible in this case, then it opens up a couple of hundred others to similar review, whether really warranted or not.  It's an unsatisfactory explanation in this context, when a man's life is on the line, but it's a real problem for those who work in the trenches.

This is information only.  I don't support doing one thing or the other.  Refusing to review everything when a man is scheduled to be executed makes me queasy though, no question there.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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29 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Just for illustrative purposes, this document is the type that is discussed in post 11 as being drafted by the prosecution and adopted, in most cases wholly, by the trial court judge.

To a certain extent, having the winner draft the findings and conclusions makes sense.  In federal court, when there's a bench civil trial, both parties draft their own findings and conclusions and submit them to the court.  The judge goes over them and picks and chooses the ones that supports his ultimate ruling, and usually adds a few of his own. That seems pretty fair. 

In this context, though, it happens after a jury's verdict and explains why the judge denies a new trial, usually after it is denied.   That they are adopted wholesale is disturbing but not terribly surprising.  Even when only the winner drafts, it doesn't necessarily behoove them to "overdo it" for appeals purposes.  But it's a little stinky because a sharp prosecutor can draft them to resist appellate review.

The counter to all this hand-wringing about refusing to do a relatively small thing like review DNA evidence is that once you rule that it's permissible in this case, then it opens up a couple of hundred others to similar review, whether really warranted or not.  It's an unsatisfactory explanation in this context, when a man's life is on the line, but it's a real problem for those who work in the trenches.

This is information only.  I don't support doing one thing or the other.  Refusing to review everything when a man is scheduled to be executed makes me queasy though, no question there.

Even if that happened in this case, the court's summary of what was testified to during the hearing is what is really important in my opinion, and it squares with the press coverage at the time.  The supposed smoking gun that Fennel said he was out drinking and came home later than he initially said turned out to be unsupported under cross.  The ME testimony about time of death was one (famous) Dr's opinion and he agreed on the stand with the general view that there's really no reliable way to estimate time of death.  It's largely guesswork.  I personally don't put much stock in either's side medical testimony about time of death.  There's far more compelling circumstantial evidence that she was killed on her way to work in the early morning hours. The ME testimony in that regard - which is just guesswork anyway - isn't really that important in my view.  

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1 hour ago, bschoolprof said:

1) I've followed this case closely for many years.  Reed is guilty as fuck IMO.  Here's what I wrote on the scat site several years ago, with archived links:

2) Many of the latest allegations repeated in press stories about Fennel's alibi and ME testimony about time of death were heard by the trial court, where cross-examination was allowed, in 2017.  You can read the judge's opinion here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4345166/Rodney-Reed-Shaver-Findings.pdf. He did not find this evidence compelling (I did not either).  

3) The latest allegation - that Fennel confessed to some white supremacist dude in a prison yard - sounds like complete horseshit, but would be another in a long chain of complete horseshit witnesses that have been paraded around by Reed's team as evidence he didn't do it.    

4) Testing the belt for DNA will not be dispositive in any way.  If Reed's DNA is found, his team will just say "of course, they were having a secret affair!!"  

5) Rodney Reed is the not the hill you want to die on to prove the system fucked over an innocent guy.  Find another case - there are plenty.   

Image result for well, that's fucking interesting, man

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On 6/30/2018 at 12:08 PM, Chopper said:

The Rodney Reed conviction is a grotesque miscarriage of justice. I'm certain there are a few people still living in Bastrop County who deserve a little retribution. 

 

20 hours ago, irishtexan said:

So I did a search and this was the only thread I could find. Looks like we're gonna execute an innocent man on November 20th. This is awful. I'm gonna make the calls to all the officials tomorrow but they'll go through with it because they're gutless twats afraid to admit that mistakes can be made in criminal justice. I just can't fathom what that man is going through.

https://www.innocenceproject.org/stand-with-rodney-reed-on-texas-death-row/

 

20 hours ago, HOOKEM4 said:

This guy is innocent. If he is executed, everyone will have blood on their hands. So fucked up.

 

19 hours ago, Updawg said:

What I read today makes me thinks it needs to be reviewed more and there is no way he should be executed. I only read two articles but there was enough to convince me. I'm anti death penalty to begin with though.

http://media.wix.com/ugd/235808_99b68a76d3144c4faac8375a404f376d.pdf

p.10

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 And, if Reed persists with a consent defense, he must explain the rapes of Connie York, Lucy Eipper, twelve-year-old A.W., intellectually-disabled Caroline Rivas, Vivian Harbottle, and the attempted rape of Linda Schlueter. Many of these victims were Stites's age or very near (York, Eipper, Schlueter); many were abused in Bastrop (A.W., Rivas, Harbottle, and Schlueter; the latter two in extremely close proximity to Stites's work route); a couple were raped or abducted close in time to Stites's murder (Harbottle and Schlueter; the latter around 3:00 a.m.); many were subject to anal or attempted anal rape (York, Eipper, A.W., and Rivas); and all but one were subjected to physical violence in addition to rape or attempted rape (York, Eipper, A.W., Rivas, and Schlueter). Reed had a distinct pattern and practice of raping women, and it overwhelmingly negates his weak consent defense raised at trial or in his postconviction proceedings.

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Ok so try him for rape. 

For this capital murder case if there's DNA evidence that can be tested it needs to be tested. People don't get executed for rape. They're going to execute this guy and blatantly refuse to test the evidence. Refusing to do so then executing him amounts to murder in my opinion. 

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His DNA was in the woman's vagina and anus.  He initially denied knowing her to police.  Once they had the evidence, he said it was consensual and he was afraid because it was a secret mixed race affair.  The same thing he said in earlier rape and assaults.

Not sure what additional DNA testing would prove here.  

 

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After he raped me, he had this look in his eyes like he wanted to kill me,” says Vivian Harbottle. “I begged him for my life. I told him that I had three kids… He just kept staring at me. I was crying ‘please don’t kill me’ and then he finally left.”

A DNA match would tell Harbottle, a year and a half later (May 1997), that the man who sexually assaulted her near the railroad tracks in Bastrop was Rodney Reed, who is currently on death row for the rape and murder of Stacey Stites. The 19-year-old HEB cashier was killed April 23, 1996, six months after the Harbottle assault.

“I’m no angel,” says Harbottle, 56, who has had three DWI convictions and an assault charge after a bar fight. “But that man raped me.” She says she decided to do her first interview about the October 1995 incident because “no one is speaking up for the victims. No one is saying what a dirtbag Reed is. Everything is getting twisted around.”

Reed supporters celebrated a stay of execution by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in February, just ten days before his March 5 date with the lethal injection in Huntsville. Amid much controversy, claims of Reed’s innocence, and charges of racism, the CCA is reviewing the case. Reed’s defense team points to Stites’ ex-boyfriend, former Giddings police officer Jimmy Fennell, as the likely perpetrator, after Fennell pled guilty in 2008 of sexually assaulting a woman in custody while on duty in Georgetown.

But Harbottle says there’s no doubt in her mind that Reed is guilty. Six months after the Stites murder he was involved in another kipnapping and attempted sexual assault, but that victim escaped. “I don’t feel so bad for me,” she says. “I feel really bad for Stacey. If we were able to pin (the Harbottle rape) on Reed, she might still be alive.”

Harbottle was intoxicated the night she was raped, she admits. After a night of partying at Ray’s Place on Chestnut Street, where she used to work as a bartender, Harbottle started walking to her stepson’s house via the railroad tracks behind the bar. “Reed just came out of nowhere,” she says. They sat on the tracks and talked for a few minutes, she said, but when she got up to leave Reed threw her to the ground and raped her. “He had his hand over my mouth and then the train went by with the horn blowing,” she said. “No one could hear me scream.” The incident occurred about 100 yards from Reed’s house, but the case went cold when Harbottle couldn’t identify her attacker. She walked back to Ray’s and called police that night in ’95, but “it was dark and I was drunk,” she says. Police were able to draw a DNA sample, however, which matched when Reed turned himself in for a petty drug charge in April ’97 and submitted DNA. That’s also how he became a suspect in the rape/murder of Stites.

It’s been 20 years and “everybody keeps telling me to move on, to forget the past,” she says, “but how can I when (the Reed case) is in the news all the time.” Harbottle says she’s been harassed by Reed supporters and had to report one to the police so he would stop coming by her restaurant (the short-lived In Cahoots in Bastrop) and grilling her about her testimony. She was called by the prosecutors during the sentencing phase of Reed’s trial. Four other former Reed rape victims also testified. “I’ve been called a liar and a whore,” she says. “I’ve had to stay off the Internet because it’s just too upsetting.”

Reed is still under indictment in the rapes of Harbottle and a 12-year-old girl, plus an attempted kidnapping, but he wasn’t tried in those cases because he was found guilty of capital murder in the Stites case.

 

http://www.michaelcorcoran.net/archives/3712

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At first, Rodney Reed said he didn’t know the victim. “It wasn’t me.” But after being presented with DNA evidence that he’d had sex with the 19-year-old woman, he changed his story. It was consensual sex, he finally admitted, but because he’s black and she’s white, he had to keep it on the down low. Races ain’t ‘sposed to mix in small-town Texas, you see.

This was in Wichita Falls in 1987, not Bastrop ten years later, when Reed would follow the same m.o. after he was indicted and later convicted of the rape and murder of Stacey Stites.

You know that case, right? Nineteen year old doesn’t show up for her 3:30 a.m. shift at HEB on April 23, 1996. She’s found dead in a wooded area 12 hours later with her pants unzipped and her t-shirt off. Her fiancee, Giddings police officer, Jimmy Fennell fails two polygraphs and is the prime suspect until the DNA matches Rodney Reed almost a year later.

There’s a documentary about the case called “State vs. Reed” and the Austin Chronicle has written extensively about it, pushing the idea that Reed is innocent and the cop boyfriend killed her in a jealous rage when he found out that she and Reed were having an affair. Fennell bolstered the defense’s case, which is now at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans seeking a new trial, when he pled guilty in 2008 to improper sexual activity with a person in custody and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The lawyers for Reed, who sits on Death Row near Huntsville, have vowed to fight this to the end.

But this is no Michael Morton case. Texas Monthly or another major magazine hasn’t touched this national true crime story because, although there remains questions (see links below) about the death of Stacey Stites, Rodney Reed has been scarring lives since 1987.

When the Austin Chronicle put Rodney Reed on the cover of it’s May 24, 2002 issue (“Who Killed Stacey Stites?”), there was no mention of his history of alleged sexual assaults until about 4,000 words into a 5,000-word story. After proudly pointing out that Reed was aquitted of the only rape charge he faced in court, Chronicle crime reporter Jordan Smith wrote “Reed and his family say they can prove he did not commit the other assaults,” leaving it at that.

Maybe instead of asking “Who Killed Stacey Stites?” and serving as the mouthpiece of the defense, the weekly should’ve wondered “Why was Rodney Reed’s semen inside a badly-beaten 12-year-old girl?”

There is DNA evidence that while Reed was out on bail in the Wichita Falls case, he beat, raped and sodomized a 12-year-old Bastrop girl. The DNA testing from the Stites rape would tie him to that case, which never went to trial because Reed was sent to death row in 1998.

Reed bounced between Bastrop, where his mother lived, and his father’s home town of Wichita Falls, where he was accused of another vicious attack in 1991. The day after his girlfriend and mother of his two children Lucy E. ended their relationship, Reed broke in and raped and sodomized her in front of the kids, the woman said. But after contacting police and filing a report, she decided it wouldn’t be worth it to press charges.

Three more women came forward during the punishment phase of Reed’s  capital murder trial and described animalistic attacks from the man that they were terrified might one day walk out of prison. The sexual assault of May 1995 yielded the DNA profile that ended up convicting Reed in the Stites case, though, again, the victim was an ex-girlfriend who didn’t think anyone would believe her.

The other two assaults were more damning to Reed’s claims of innocence, as the first was six months before the Stites murder and the other was six months after. In both cases, the women were abducted from Bastrop’s Cedar Street, which is on Stites’ route from her apartment in Giddings to her job at HEB. The first rape, in October 1995, was a cold case until the DNA match was made 18 months later. The February ’97 attack was an attempted rape that could’ve followed the Stites scenario. Victim Linda Schlueter stopped in at Long’s Star Mart for something and there was Reed, asking for a ride, please. She hestitated because she didn’t know him, but Reed can be charming, convincing. He hopped in. But instead of guiding him to his house at 806 Martin Luther King Blvd., he had her turn into an abandoned lot where he demanded sex, then beat her up when she declined. She was lucky to get out of the car as a pair of headlights approached- and Reed slid over to the driver’s side and floored it.

One of the Reed defense team’s key points of appeal is that although 11 sworn witnesses were ready to testify that they had seen Reed and Stites kissing, holding hands, etc., only two were called at the trial. But Reed’s original court-appointed attorneys explained in an interview, after the jury deliberated four hours to find Reed guilty, that to call the other witnesses, all close friends or relatives of Reed, most with criminal histories, would open the door for prosecutors to call up previous victims of Reed. If they claim it was a consensual affair, we have witnesses who will describe forcible sexual encounters with Reed. Another victim of the vicious murder of Stacey Stites was her brother, who committed suicide the next year.

Reed was known by authorities to roam the streets at night and sometimes walk along the railroad tracks. He also occasionally sold drugs, which led to his arrest for delivery of cocaine in April 1997. By sheer coincidence, the DNA match from Reed’s alleged rape in May ’95 to the Stites case had come back positive for Reed the day he turned himself in on the petty drug charge. Investigators asked if he knew Stacey Stites and Reed said only from the news reports. Never met her.

When they hit him with the irrefutable DNA evidence that his semen was found in Stites vaginal cavity, Reed went back to Wichita Falls in ’87. When he went to trial on that rape charge, the jury believed his “secret affair” story and he was aquitted.

Stacey Stites.

Although Jimmy Fennell is the poster boy for “shadow of a doubt,” Reed’s entire case is built on the claim that he had consensual sex with Stacey Stites more than 24 hours before her body was found. To believe his story, she carried his semen home to her racist cop boyfriend that night, didn’t shower the next day and then went to work. And yet the defense has presented zero credible proof that Reed and Stites had even met. A bunch of friends and relatives who’ve had problems with the law pointing a finger at a cop? That’s not going to do it. Where are the notes, the photos, the stray hair, the little gifts that may have Stites’ fingerprints?

A key witness for the prosecution was Stacey’s mother Carol, who lived downstairs from the Giddings apartment Fennell and Stites lived in. The night before Stacey’s rape/murder, Carol suggested to Jimmy that he let Stacey take his truck to work, then she’d give him her car the next day. Having one vehicle was an ongoing problem with the young couple. Carol Stites testified that at about 3 a.m. she heard the couple’s door open once and heard one set of footsteps go down the stairs, which was the routine when Stacey had to work. At 6:30 a.m., when she was notified that Stacey was missing, she immediately called Jimmy who came down the stairs. He went to Carol’s apartment and Carol gave him her only set of car keys so he could drive out to look for Stacey. There was only ONE set of keys to the car and she had it overnight. Jimmy didn’t have another vehicle. The only way he could’ve killed his fiancée was if her mother had been complicit.

After the murder of their employee, HEB offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer and yet no one thought to drop a dime on Rodney the crack dealer, who they seen with that white girl.

If anyone accused of a rape-murder can explain away their semen by claiming an illicit affair, as unlikely as the couple might seem, that would really clog the appeals courts.

But you figure that first they’d throw out all the cases where the convicted have shown a pattern for the behavior they are accused of doing.
Texas Monthly has not done the 12,000-word story about the Rodney Reed case because Michael Morton was not an accused sexual predator with the DNA evidence to back it up, before he was sent to Death Row.

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39 minutes ago, Junior Miller said:

You writing it like this tells me everything I need to know of your motivations and bias here. 

This was copied over from the scat site and is missing context.  Reed's story in both trials was that the affairs had to be kept "secret" due to racial prejudice.  He brought race into the mix.  My point in highlighting the other victim's race was to point out the pattern of his excuses and preposterous nature of his defense: that two women with which he was having affairs, both of which were kept secret due to racism, just happened to end up victimized soon after he was intimate with them.  If you believe that, then you're even more of a moron than your coming across on this thread.  

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I get that, but it is still a DP case and all evidence should be tested so the endless bullshit appeals can be finally denied. Then the dirtbag gets his due immediately with the needle.

Serial rapists & child rapists should be executed after diligent due process too, IMO.

Edited by Armybrat
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Seems like a real winner:

Quote

Maybe instead of asking “Who Killed Stacey Stites?” and serving as the mouthpiece of the defense, the weekly should’ve wondered “Why was Rodney Reed’s semen inside a badly-beaten 12-year-old girl?”

There is DNA evidence that while Reed was out on bail in the Wichita Falls case, he beat, raped and sodomized a 12-year-old Bastrop girl. The DNA testing from the Stites rape would tie him to that case, which never went to trial because Reed was sent to death row in 1998.

http://www.michaelcorcoran.net/archives/3005
 

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1 minute ago, Armybrat said:

I get that, but it is still a DP case and all evidence should be tested so the endless bullshit appeals can be finally denied so the dirtbag gets his due immediately with the needle.

Serial rapists & child rapists should be executed after diligent due process too, IMO.

Not taking a position, but you do realize that "the endless bullshit appeals" are being denied, currently.

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1 minute ago, irishtexan said:

OK. Does anyone have a link to an article on Reed's shady past that doesn't come from a chat board? 

I've tried, but no dice.  The author of that site claims he got the info by going to the bastrop courthouse and reading testimony from the punishment phase of the trial.  The past acts were apparently kept out of the guilt/innocence phase due to them being potentially prejudicial.  The state repeats these allegations in later court filings, so I don't doubt that witnesses testified to these acts in the proceedings.

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2 minutes ago, bschoolprof said:

I've tried, but no dice.  The author of that site claims he got the info by going to the bastrop courthouse and reading testimony from the punishment phase of the trial.  The past acts were apparently kept out of the guilt/innocence phase due to them being potentially prejudicial.  The state repeats these allegations in later court filings, so I don't doubt that witnesses testified to these acts in the proceedings.

It seems that if there was all this evidence supporting his guilt, that would be a pretty great story to write right about now. At this point I'm skeptical of everything, but believe we probably shouldn't execute a dude unless there is 100% certainty of guilt. Sounds like there are some questions. You can't un-ring that bell.

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If I am reading the above correctly I really want to give a huge shout out to Michael Corcoran for using the apparent fact that Texas Monthly didn't write an expose on the trial as a reason to put a man to death. That is some fucking clever logic!

Quote

But this is no Michael Morton case. Texas Monthly or another major magazine hasn’t touched this national true crime story because, although there remains questions (see links below) about the death of Stacey Stites...

As for me, I do believe all evidence in a dp case should be tested and find the prosecution's years-long effort to avoid doing so shameful and immoral. Also if the other stuff of what Corcoran wrote is true well shame on auschron and ABC news or NBC's Deadline that did a detailed look at the case, and shame on me for believing them. 

Edited by Chopper
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12 minutes ago, Chopper said:

If I am reading the above correctly I really want to give a huge shout out to Michael Corcoran for using the apparent fact that Texas Monthly didn't write an expose on the trial as a reason to put a man to death. That is some fucking clever logic!

As for me, I do believe all evidence in a dp case should be tested and find the prosecution's years-long effort to avoid doing so shameful and immoral. Also if the other stuff of what Corcoran wrote is true well shame on auschron and ABC news or NBC's Deadline that did a detailed look at the case, and shame on me for believing them. 

They want to test the belt now, which is the murder weapon.  Which was available at trial for testing.  Reed did not have it tested then.  So of course the state does not want something that was freely available to be tested before or at trial to be tested now.  The fucking thing has been handled by God knows how many people before and during trial.  This is not the prosecution hiding shit like they did in the Morton case.  

This is a delay tactic, nothing more.  

As far as I know, there has not been any allegation that Reed's trial attorneys offered him ineffective assistance of counsel by not having the belt tested or for anything else.  I have not read all the briefing though.  But from news reports that does not seem to be what they are arguing.

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33 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

The autopsy shows she was being sexually assaulted while she was being strangled (this was because Stites's anus was dilated and bore peri-mortem injuries).  Reed's semen was in her vagina and anus.  The only semen there.  He did it.  And his defense was the same one he used in 1987.

Saw a clip on NBC News last night about this.  I knew nothing about the case before that and they didn't provide his back story.  His explanation of how his semen got inside her was, quite frankly, hard to believe.

He can be guilty and the boyfriend cop be a shit bag.

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