The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Rodney Reed’s petition for a new trial in the murder conviction that sent him to death row 25 years ago. The ruling surprised many as it came four years after the high court issued a stay of execution for Reed five days before he was scheduled to be killed.
In the 7-1 decision, the TCCA found that “Reed has failed to make an affirmative, persuasive showing that, likelier than not, he is innocent of Stacey Stites’s murder.” Reed had claimed that the state hid evidence and presented false testimony during his trial.
Reed, who is Black, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998 by an all-white jury of the 1996 abduction, rape, and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites, who was white. Reed has always maintained his innocence and insists that he and Stites were involved in a romantic relationship, and Stites was killed by her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, after he discovered the affair. Both Reed and Fennell, a former police officer, have been convicted in the past of sexual assaults.
This isn’t the end of the line for Reed, however. In a 6-3 ruling in April in an opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a U.S. Court of Appeal for the 5th Circuit decision denying his attempts to obtain post-conviction DNA testing evidence found at the scene of Stites’s murder. Hearings on that issue will be held in the lower courts.
