Texas’ highest court for criminal appeals released a decision Dec. 17 denying a petition for a new trial from death row inmate Rodney Reed of Bastrop. Reed, convicted in the 1996 rape and strangulation of 19-year-old Stacy Stites, has been under a death sentence since his trial in Bastrop in 1998.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had been considering this latest appeal since 2006 when 335th District Judge Reva Towslee Corbett held a hearing on what defense lawyers claimed was new evidence in the case which was not available at the original trial. Some of that evidence may have been deliberately withheld from the defense at that time, the appeals lawyers argued. But Judge Corbett was not impressed, finding testimony by two new witnesses unpersuasive, and the high criminal court appeared in no hurry to render a decision. Oral arguments in the case were not held until earlier this year.
There was earlier speculation in legal circles that the appeals court might be considering an order calling for a new trial. The justices asked the state and defense to brief them on what they should do if the hearing judge’s (Corbett) findings of fact and conclusions of law were inconsistent, in some cases, with the record of the evidentary proceedings.
In the end, however, the appeals court decided that such inconsistencies made little difference and that the trial jury likely would not have reached a different verdict if they had heard the new witnesses. Of course, this is the same court which once ruled that a defense lawyer who slept through some testimony during a capital murder trial did not provide ineffective counsel to his client.
The chief evidence against Reed was DNA recovered from the victim’s body, though he was not charged for almost a year after the killing. From the beginning, the defense has relied on two lines of argument:
1. Since Reed was having a clandestine affair with Stites, the DNA evidence does not really point to him as her killer. Apart from Reed’s claims about the alleged affair, independent evidence of such a romantic link has been difficult to produce, however.
2. Since Stites was living with and engaged to be married to (then) Giddings police officer Jimmy Fennell Jr. at the time of her death, defense lawyers argued he was far more likely a suspect in her murder than Reed. Indeed for almost a year Fennell was the chief suspect in the case, but he was never charged, largely because investigators could not find a plausible theory of how he could have strangled Stites, left her body on a rural road near FM 1441 east of Bastrop, left his truck in the Bastrop High School parking lot by 5:30 a.m. and returned to his apartment in Giddings before learning that Stites had failed to show up for her 3:30 a.m. shift at the Bastrop H-E-B food store. Fennell borrowed an auto from Stites’ mother, who lived in the same apartment complex in Giddings, to drive to Bastrop and help search for the missing Smithville High School graduate. Stites routinely drove Fennell’s pickup to work.
In arguing their case, defense lawyers have struggled with the same issue. Their best response so far has been to theorize that Fennell might have been helped by someone, though solid evidence for such speculation has so far remained out of reach.
It has also proved difficult for them to take advantage of legal troubles facing Fennell since he testified at the Reed trial about his activities the day his fiancee died. Most recently, Fennell was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexual misconduct with a woman in custody while he was a police officer on duty in Georgetown.
At the current pace, Reed could remain on death row for another 10 years before his appeals are exhausted. Still ahead are appeals to US district and appeals courts, possibly including the US Supreme Court.