"The mother of death row inmate Rodney Reed said Saturday she is
guardedly optimistic about her son’s chances for freedom after the
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled prosecutors presented “false and
misleading” testimony in his 1998 capital murder conviction. “I’m hoping for justice,” Sandra Reed told the
American-Statesman. “But we have presented so many other pieces of
evidence before this that should have at least opened up a new trial.
How can you bring a case to justice without the truth?”.........Reed was convicted of the 1996 murder of Stacy Stites, a
19-year-old Giddings resident with whom he claimed he was having a
secret affair. Prosecutors argued Reed abducted, raped and strangled
Stiles on her way to work. But defense attorneys have argued that Stites was was killed by
her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, a former Georgetown police officer who is
now serving a 10-year sentence for the kidnapping and sexual assault of a
woman in his custody in 2007. Reed’s attorney Bryce Benjet has said that the state’s key
expert witness at the trial, then-Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto
Bayardo, has since disavowed his testimony implicating Reed, saying
that the sperm found in Stites’ body was likely deposited more than 24
hours before her death.
Benjet said a new analysis of medical and forensic evidence by a
pair of forensic pathologists shows that Stites was likely killed hours
before she was supposed to have left for work and that her body was
moved to a rural Bastrop County road after her death. The court of appeals last month rejected the defense claim that
the new evidence established Reed’s innocence, but sent the case back
to a Bastrop County court to consider the claims of false testimony
during the original trial.........Reed was 10 days from his execution date in February 2015, when
the court ordered a closer look at his request for modern DNA testing
of items linked to the murder. But in April the appeals court denied
Reed’s request for additional DNA testing, citing the possibility of
“cross-contamination” of evidence that had mingled in boxes after
repeated handling by court employees."
