Plea to Texas Courts

Appeals Court Weighs Plea to 'Correct Miscarriage of Justice'
28th March 2008

Nearly 10 years after Rodney Reed was convicted of murder and condemned to die, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals now is tasked with deciding whether he should receive a new trial.

Reed's lawyers, including former CCA Judge Morris Overstreet and former Texas Defender Service attorney Bryce Benjet; argue that if Reed's Bastrop jury had known of the available evidence in the case, it would not have convicted Reed of the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites. "If a jury had the opportunity to review all of the evidence, they would've made a different decision," Overstreet told reporters outside the CCA building on March 20. "This court can do what it needs to do to correct a miscarriage of justice."

Reed was convicted of killing 19-year-old Stites, a Giddings resident, as she drove to work for an early-morning shift at the Bastrop HEB on April 23, 1996. Stites was strangled with a belt and her body dumped alongside a country road just north of town; the red pickup truck she was driving – which belonged to her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, then a Giddings Police officer – was found in the parking lot of Bastrop High School.

Although DNA evidence on Stites' body eventually led investigators to Reed, who acknowledged having an affair with Stites, no other evidence tied Reed to the crime. Reed's supporters argue that Fennell is a far more likely suspect because he was upset about Reed and Stites' relationship.

In fact, although the state claims that Fennell was initially a suspect, documents in the case reflect that police never seriously pursued him: They failed to process fully for evidence from his pickup truck and instead returned it to him within days of the murder. Moreover, they never searched the apartment Stites and Fennell shared, even though it was the last place Stites was known to be alive.

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