FLASH BRIEFING

Execution date requested for Reed

Prosecutors ask for Nov. 20; defense lawyers say effort is improper

Chuck Lindell
clindell@statesman.com
Death row inmate Rodney Reed enters a Bastrop County courtroom in October 2017 for a hearing on an appeal of his murder conviction. [RALPH BARRERA/AMERICAN-STATESMAN]

Asking a state judge to act as quickly as possible, Bastrop County prosecutors have requested a Nov. 20 execution date for Rodney Reed in the 1996 strangulation death of Stacey Stites.

Defense lawyers responded Monday by asking Visiting Judge Doug Shaver to throw out the motion to set an execution date, arguing that it was an improper response to a front-page story in the Bastrop Advertiser about efforts by Reed's family and supporters to fight his conviction.

The request from prosecutors, filed Friday, came one day after the newspaper story and appears to have been filed "in retaliation for the Reed family’s legitimate exercise of their 1st Amendment rights," defense lawyers told Shaver.

Reed's lawyers asked Shaver to order prosecutors to turn over internal communications about their motion and sit for sworn depositions. They also asked the judge to impose sanctions, if warranted, against prosecutors.

Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz called the defense motion "ludicrous" and said the request for an execution date was tied to court deadlines and nothing else.

Goertz said he and Matthew Ottoway, a state assistant attorney general who has helped the county on Reed's case, planned to file the motion 14 days after the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the last of several appeals that Reed's lawyers had filed in recent years.

The 14-day window allowed time for defense attorneys to ask the court to reconsider its ruling, but that motion to rehear was not filed.

“All of Reed’s appeals are exhausted, so from the state’s perspective (setting an execution date) is the next procedural step,” Goertz said.

But Reed's lawyers, in their response to the judge, argued that prosecutors know Reed plans to file additional federal court appeals and asked Shaver to bar the prosecution from seeking an execution date until that review is complete.

Defense lawyer Bryce Benjet also said Goertz's 14-day timeline appeared to be a pretext because state law did not allow a motion to rehear in Reed's case.

In Friday's motion, Goertz requested that the date be set without a court hearing, saying the issues have not changed since Reed's execution was scheduled, but later delayed, in 2015.

"This is a subsequent execution setting request, Reed has attended two prior hearings on such matters, and Reed is represented by a plethora of attorneys who can make objections, if any, known through briefing," Goertz told the judge.

If Shaver decides a hearing is needed, Goertz suggested that it be held "as soon as possible" to meet a state law that requires courts to set an execution date at least 90 days in the future.

"An order would need to be entered by August 21, 2019 for purposes of setting Reed’s execution on the date requested by the State," he wrote in the motion.

Stites' body was found alongside a rural road outside Bastrop after she did not show up for an early morning shift at a Bastrop grocery store. Her pickup was parked several miles away.

Police and prosecutors concluded that Stites had been raped and strangled, and Reed was arrested after DNA tests concluded that his sperm was found inside the victim.

Reed claimed he and Stites were having a secret affair, and defense lawyers argued that Stites had been killed by her fiance, Jimmy Fennell, perhaps after discovering the relationship.

Reed was originally scheduled for lethal injection on March 5, 2015, but the Court of Criminal Appeals stepped in with only 10 days to spare to allow time to consider claims that a new look at old forensic evidence would show that Reed was innocent of the crime.

Defense lawyers argued that leading experts in forensic pathology — after viewing autopsy reports, crime scene video and other evidence — later determined that Stites had been killed around midnight, when she was at the Giddings apartment she shared with Fennell and hours before she and Reed could have crossed paths in Bastrop.

In addition, defense lawyers argued that Reed’s conviction was based on trial testimony from three prosecution experts that is now acknowledged to have been wrong.

The scientific experts had testified that Reed’s sperm cells, with tails still attached, proved that the semen had been deposited no more than 26 hours before it was examined, fitting a prosecution timeline showing that Reed had raped and killed Stites.

In recent years, the employers of two of the experts have backed away from the testimony, and the third — former Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo — acknowledged that a 26-hour time limit for intact sperm cells was not “medically or scientifically supported.”

The Court of Criminal Appeals, however, rejected the arguments, clearing the way for the request to set an execution date.

Staff writer Brandon Mulder contributed to this report.