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Rodney Reed: Celebrities want to prevent execution

2019-11-13T07:22:52.537Z


Rodney Reed is due to be executed for murder next week in Texas - though there is considerable doubt about his guilt. Celebrities and legal experts demand his pardon.



The body of Stacey Stites lay beneath the pines on the edge of a gravel road in Texas. A car driver who had stopped to pick flowers found the lifeless body of the 20-year-olds. She had choking on her neck, her face was bluish, her torso bared.

The murder of 1996 has now returned to the consciousness of the US public. After more than two decades on death row, Rodney Reed, 51, convicted of the crime, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday next week. His upcoming execution has sparked international protests.

Celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Rihanna are demanding Reed's pardon. An online petition has so far received 2.7 million signatures. Republican US Senator Ted Cruz and Democrat Democrat candidate Beto O'Rourke, both from Texas, supported Reed. Even the EU has joined.

PLEASE @GovAbbott Rodney Reed has come forward and even implied the other person of interest. I URGE YOU TO DO THE RIGHT THING.

- Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) October 19, 2019

There are great doubts about Reed's guilt: The litigation was dubious, new evidence and testimonies point to another offender. The only person who can stop the execution is Governor Greg Abbott, a vassal of US President Donald Trump. But Abbott is silent.

"We can only wait and hope," says Julia Lucivero of the lawyer and activist group Innocence Project the SPIEGEL. Critics see Reed's fate as a symbol of the continuing inequality and unfairness of the US judiciary, especially in death sentences. Because they are statistically much more likely, according to the independent Death Penalty Information Center, if the murder victim is white - and the defendant not.

Stacey Stites was a white woman. Reed, a black man, was convicted by twelve white jurors. The other suspect is Stites' then fiancé - a white policeman who was later detained for a sexual offense.

AP

"Do not kill Rodney Reed!" Protest demonstration in the Texas capital Austin

Stipes and her fiancé lived in the poor heart of Texas. Stites, who graduated from high school only the year before, worked in a supermarket. Her three-year-old fiancé was an aspiring police officer.

In April 1996, Stites disappeared on the way to work. Her body was found the next day. The investigators interrogated more than 20 potential suspects, including the young woman's fiancé. It took another year, however, until the investigators met Rodney Reed by chance: his DNA traces were found on Stites.

The then 28-year-old Reed, who had previously been accused of sexual coercion, but was acquitted, initially denied having known Stites, but then took back. Since then he claims to have had only one affair with her and the day before her murder consensual sex, which explains his DNA traces.

Executions since 1976

During the six-week trial, the prosecution presented gruesome murder details and portrayed Reed as a notorious sex offender. In May 1998, the jury imposed the death penalty. To this day, Reed assures his innocence. In 2001, the Innocence Project took on his. The New York organization has now released nearly 400 unjustly convicted, including 21 death row candidates.

Reed is also innocent, explains Bryce Benjet, his lawyer at the Innocence Project. Benjet refers to exonerating circumstances that were not taken into account in the process and to errors in the investigation. So the belt Stites was strangled on was never tested for DNA. Also, the forensic doctors admitted to the prosecutor's office subsequently errors.

AP

Rodrick Reed (r.), Rodney Reed's brother, in a protest demonstration in Austin

Other experts, including the most prominent US medical examiner Michael Baden, consider it "medically and scientifically impossible" that Reed was the culprit. Stites had been killed hours before the alleged crime - the night before, when she was with her fiancé and Reed had an alibi.

Other, new witnesses burden the fiancé, who later served a ten-year prison term for sexual assault and freed in 2018. Arthur Snow, a former inmate and ex-member of the neo-Nazi gang Aryan Brotherhood, sworn allegiance that the fiancé had confided in him to murder Stites out of jealousy. The sheriff Curtis Davis, once best friend and then alibi of the fiancé, revised his information. A former colleague testified that the fiance had already threatened Stites with murder before.

All of these were "inventions of creative, brilliant lawyers to save a convict," the fiance's lawyer countered on ABC News. "The right man has been convicted," said prosecutor Lisa Tanner the station.

Rodney Reed on November 20th and makes an appeal to @Govabbott for clemency on his behalf. Evidence in Mr. Reed's case casts substantial doubt as to his culpability. #EndCapitalPunishment @RDunhamDPIC pic.twitter.com/Nt7w0IPKKQ

- EU in the US (@EUintheUS) 1 November 2019

Reed's lawyers have exhausted all legal remedies. At the end of October they petitioned the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. So far, the authority has not responded. Even a request from a dozen legal experts to the Supreme Court remained unanswered.

More and more celebrities are involved with appeals, petitions and letters, including rapper Meek Mill and LL Cool J. Psychologist and TV talk show host Phil McGraw visited Reed on death row and invited witnesses to the studio. "The evidence in Reed's case raises serious doubts about his guilt," wrote Stavros Lambrinidis, EU Ambassador to the United States, in a letter to Governor Abbott.

Reed himself does not give up. "Racism played a big role," he said in an interview with ABC News about his trial. "I just did not realize it." He does not want to think about his execution. "They will execute an innocent man."

Source: spiegel

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