In 1998, Rodney Reed, a black man, was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites, a white woman. The state of Texas set his execution date for November 20th. For the past 21 years, Reed and his lawyers have maintained his innocence, and several renowned forensic pathologists have come forward saying that Reed’s guilt is scientifically impossible. On November 15, an appeals court suspended his sentence indefinitely until new evidence was studied.
Experts say that evidence points to Stites’ fiance, a white police officer named Jimmy Fennel, who has served 10 years in prison for a sex crime and kidnapping and has a documented history of violence against women. Reed and Stites were in a consensual relationship at the time of her murder, and Fennel apparently boasted about killing her after the fact.
There is no question that this case is a racially charged one: a black man accused of killing a white woman is sentenced to death by an all-white jury, thereby letting a white police officer off the hook. The case has been referred to as a “Jim Crow” case for its clear racial bias.
“[The case] has all the characteristics of what used to be lynchings … This looks like an African American man is being railroaded to his death because of a consensual relationship with a white woman who was cheating on a dirty cop,” Robert Dunham, executive director of The Death Penalty Information Center, says.
The Innocence Project, an organization which aims to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted using DNA evidence, spearheaded an effort to get Texas governor Greg Abbot to delay the execution for 30 days and possibly change his sentence. The governor had approved 47 executions in his five years in office and had stopped one. Texas executes the most convicts each year out of every state, having already executed seven this past year.
Fieldston students Esmé Fox (VI) and Lily Steele (VI) do not plan on standing by while an innocent man is executed. They sent out a petition by The Innocence Project to the whole school, encouraging students to get involved and sign it.
Over the summer, Fox interned for The Innocence Project, though she did not work on Reed’s case. “I worked on many others like it … which is why I feel so closely connected to it,” she says. “I think I can speak for both of us when I say we want to work to reform criminal justice for the rest of our lives.”
“[I’ve always] wanted to get involved in any way I could, though my options were limited, being my age. Last year I took Crime and Punishment as my ethics elective which really helped to solidify my interest in criminal justice,” Steele says. “Rodney Reed’s case came to our attention and we wanted to share this with our community.”
Issues like Reed’s case can sometimes seem far removed from our everyday lives as students. A man in Texas is sentenced to death, and we seem to remain mostly unaffected. However, looking at the bigger picture, this is not a question of just one man’s life, but a question of what sort of world we want to live in. It is our civic duty to get involved and stay informed, especially in matters as crucial to our future as our country’s justice system.
Although Reed’s case provides an especially upsetting look into the corrupt inner-workings of our criminal justice system, it is only scratching the surface. “There are many other Rodney Reeds out there,” Reed’s brother Roderick said in an interview with the Texas Observer. “We’re not the only ones that have been put through this.”
