Photos: Innocence Project\YouTube Screenshot
Wednesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) denied Rodney Reed’s motion for habeas relief and a new trial, rejecting overwhelming evidence supporting his innocence and demonstrating prosecutorial misconduct. While we are devastated by this ruling, we know the fight to save Rodney is not over — and we won’t give up.
In a statement after the ruling came down, Innocence Project Senior Staff Attorney Jane Pucher, who is one of Rodney’s attorneys, said, “In 2019, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Rodney Reed’s execution to allow the courts to consider his Brady, false testimony, and actual innocence claims, the CCA entrusted Judge Langley with making impartial findings and independent assessments of witnesses’ credibility, supported by the evidence. That did not happen. It is not plausible that Judge Langley could find every witness for the State to be credible and every witness called by Mr. Reed to be not credible.”
For more than two decades, Rodney has been on death row in Texas despite mounting evidence pointing to his innocence. Rodney, a Black man, was convicted by an all-white jury of the 1996 murder of a white woman named Stacey Stites. At the time, Stacey was having a consensual relationship with Rodney, while she was engaged to a police officer named Jimmy Fennell. But the prosecution told the jury that they had searched everywhere and no one ever said Rodney and Stacey knew each other.
But it was recently discovered that the prosecutors did have information that Rodney and Stacey knew each other, and at the 1998 trial, they illegally concealed statements made by Stacey’s co-workers that showed she and Rodney were romantically involved.
The State also illegally concealed statements from Stacey’s neighbors about loud, violent arguments between Stacey and her fiancé, who was the prime suspect in her murder for nearly a year.
At the recent evidentiary hearing, Rodney presented new, overwhelming evidence of his innocence — but the Texas CCA shut him down.
“Texans should be outraged that prosecutorial misconduct is going unchecked and the State is being given a license to cheat — even if it means sending an innocent man to his death,” Jane Pucher said. “Mr. Reed’s conviction and death sentence violates the most central tenets of our Constitution and cannot stand. We will continue to fight for Mr. Reed’s freedom and bring him home to his family.”
