As doubts linger, Abbott must grant reprieve to death row inmate

Convicted murderer Rodney Reed is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Nov. 20, but Gov. Greg Abbott has the power to stop it.

As it stands, there’s no indication that Abbott will. He has stopped only one execution since becoming governor five years ago.

Reed was sentenced to death in 1998, after being convicted of the brutal 1996 rape and killing of a 19-year-old woman from Central Texas, Stacey Stites. And though the governor has yet to weigh in on this specific case, he supports capital punishment, as do most voters in the state. According to a June 2018 poll from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune, fully three-fourths of Texans strongly or somewhat support the death penalty.

But the question at hand has nothing to do with the death penalty, per se. Granting a reprieve would simply be the right thing to do — and a necessary precaution against the doubts that would linger if Reed is executed as scheduled.

Reed has consistently maintained his innocence, and legitimate questions have been raised about both the verdict itself and the process by which it was reached. Reed, who is African American, was convicted by an all-white jury, largely on the basis of DNA evidence; his semen was recovered from the dead woman’s body. But by Reed’s account, he was having an affair with Stites, who was engaged to a man named Jimmy Fennell, a police officer at the time and an original person of interest in the case.

Also, Reed’s legal team hasn’t exhausted its federal appeals yet, even though the Bastrop man has been on death row for more than two decades. So the fact that his execution was scheduled for Nov. 20 is questionable in itself.

And on Tuesday, a bipartisan group of 26 state representatives — 13 Democrats and 13 Republicans, including several members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — called for Reed’s execution to be delayed, at least.

“As you know, the case that put Mr. Reed on death row has been called into serious question by compelling new witness statements and forensic evidence along with evidentiary gaps that could be filled with additional investigation and testing,” they wrote in a Nov. 5 letter to Abbott and David Gutiérrez, the chairman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.

For example, the murder weapon — a belt, which was used to strangle Stites — has never been tested for DNA evidence. And several witnesses have come forward since Reed’s trial to vouch that he had a seemingly friendly relationship with Stites — and share disturbing accounts of Fennell’s behavior both before and after her death.

Elsa Alcala, a longtime Texas judge who served on the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals from 2011 to 2018, has similar concerns.

“The evidence today is not what the evidence was in 1998, or even what it was back 5 years ago when I looked at the case,” she told me Friday, adding that the strength of the evidence that’s come to light since then is as notable as its volume. One of the witnesses who’s come forward, for example, has sworn that Fennell confessed to the murder of Stites some years ago, in a private conversation — and that witness, like the others who’ve come forward, has no personal connection to Reed.

The legislators warned, in their letter, that a rush to execution would undermine support for the concept of the death penalty, among other things: “Killing Rodney Reed without certainty about his guilt may exacerbate that issue and erode public trust — not only in capital punishment, but in Texas justice itself.”

That seems like asafe bet, given the attention Reed’s case has received in recent weeks. The European Union has called on Abbott to pardon Reed outright. And celebrities on both sides of the aisle have already urged the governor to intervene in other ways.

“Dear Gov. Greg Abbott, Please take a hard look at the substantial evidence in the Rodney Reed case that points to his innocence. Be honest. Be fair. Give him back his life,” wrote Beyonce, a Houston native, in a post on her website.

The former game show host Chuck Woolery, after noting that he was speaking as a conservative Texan, tweeted that he hopes Abbott grants Reed a new trial, in light of the “overwhelming new evidence.”

“Please, at least, grant him achance to prove his innocence,” Woolery wrote.

It’s a foundational premise of our system of justice that anyone charged with a crime deserves such a chance. And in light of the evidence that has emerged since Reed’s 1998 sentencing, it would be fair to say that he hasn’t actually had one yet.

The Oct. 29 sworn affidavit that Judge Alcala mentioned, from an inmate named Arthur Snow, makes a particularly chilling impression.

Snow, who begins by noting that he has been in and out of jails and prisons for most of his life, explains that in 2010 or so he encountered Fennell — Stites’ ex-fiancé, and the original person of interest in the wake of her death — at the Stevenson Unit in Cuero.

Fennell was never charged in connection with Stites’ murder, but in 2007 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping a woman and improper sexual misconduct while serving as a Georgetown police officer. The woman alleged he had raped her, according to news reports. And, in Snow’s account, he was seeking the protection of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white-only prison gang, of which Snow was a member.

“Jimmy and I were never really friends, but we occasionally made conversation,” Snow writes, before describing a conversation they had in 2010 or so, in which Fennell talked about his ex-fiancé “with a lot of hatred and resentment.”

According to Snow, Fennell claimed that he had to kill the woman, after learning she had been having an affair with a black man. But, Snow explains, he didn’t take this as a confession until learning about Reed’s case a few years later, from a newspaper article.

“In the years since I saw that newspaper article, though I was not a young man then, I finally started to grow up. I had grandkids. I started to look at the world differently. I let go of some of my prejudices,” Snow continues, in the affidavit.

“I looked at the situation differently and tried to put myself in Rodney Reed’s shoes,” he continues. “When I did, it weighed on my conscience.”

Fennell, who is white, denies killing Stites, his attorney told The New York Times.

The attorney said his client, who was released from prison in 2018, had converted to Christianity and was “living a law-abiding life.”

Abbott’s office did not respond to arequest for comment.

Since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 166 former death row inmates — roughly half of them African-American — have been exonerated.”

For the state to execute Reed without certainty about his guilt should erode public trust in Texas justice.

Let’s hope Abbott realizes that and acts accordingly, before it’s too late. erica.grieder@chron.com