Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Rejects Rodney Reed’s Brady, False Testimony, and Actual Innocence Claims

On June 28, 2023, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) denied Rodney Reed’s (pic­tured) appli­ca­tion for habeas relief and reject­ed Mr. Reed’s claim that pros­e­cu­tors at his 1998 tri­al ille­gal­ly pre­sent­ed false tes­ti­mo­ny and with­held excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence that could have exon­er­at­ed him. His case gained inter­na­tion­al atten­tion in 2019 when a bipar­ti­san group of law­mak­ers urged Republican Governor Abbot to stop his exe­cu­tion. Throughout his incar­cer­a­tion, he has con­tin­ued to main­tain his innocence. 

In 1998, he was con­vict­ed by an all-white jury and sen­tenced to death in 1998 for alleged­ly mur­der­ing Stacey Stites. Mr. Reed’s attor­neys filed a suc­ces­sor Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus ask­ing the TCCA and Bastrop County dis­trict court to vacate his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence before his sched­uled exe­cu­tion. On November 15, 2019, the TCCA stayed his sched­uled November 20 exe­cu­tion and remand­ed his case to the Bastrop County dis­trict court to review his Brady, false tes­ti­mo­ny, and actu­al inno­cence claims. Despite the new evi­dence of inno­cence pre­sent­ed at the evi­den­tiary hear­ing in July 2021, the court did not ren­der impar­tial find­ings of fact and con­clu­sions of law and found every wit­ness called by Mr. Reed to be non-cred­i­ble. Prior to the evi­den­tiary hear­ing, the pros­e­cu­tors revealed that friends and co-work­ers of Ms. Stites told police, before Mr. Reed’s tri­al, that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites were involved a roman­tic rela­tion­ship. At tri­al, the pros­e­cu­tors false­ly told the jury that evi­dence of a rela­tion­ship did not exist and ille­gal­ly sup­pressed state­ments from Ms. Stites’s neigh­bors about loud domes­tic vio­lence argu­ments between Ms. Stites and Mr. Fennell. On April 19, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Reed v. Goertz and ruled that Mr. Reed time­ly filed his chal­lenge to the State’s post­con­vic­tion DNA testing statute. 

In a state­ment released by the Innocence Project, Mr. Reed’s attor­ney, Jane Pucher, com­ment­ed, ​“For 23 years, Texas ille­gal­ly hid evi­dence that could have exon­er­at­ed Rodney Reed. He is an inno­cent man. 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.”