Democracy Now!
Did the Cops Frame Death Row Prisoner Rodney Reed for Murder?
“For 20 years, Rodney Reed, an African-American man, has been fighting his conviction and proclaiming his innocence for the 1996 rape and murder of a 19-year-old white woman, Stacey Stites. Since the Texas courts sentenced him to death over two decades ago, substantial evidence has emerged implicating Stites’s then-fiancé, a white police officer named Jimmy Fennell, who was later jailed on kidnapping and rape charges in another case. Reed and Stites had been having an affair, and Fennell was a known misogynist and racist who had threatened Stites with violence before. But during the trial, the state “relied on Jimmy Fennell to establish that they were a happy couple in which [Stites] would not be having an affair with Mr. Reed,” says Reed’s lawyer, Bryce Benjet from the Innocence Project. “Meanwhile, at the trial, Mr. Reed presented some evidence — two witnesses who said they did know about this affair. In fact, his unprepared lawyers had access to other witnesses, but they went uninvestigated and not presented. Over the two decades that we have been working on this case, every aspect of the state’s proof has essentially evaporated.”
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