Death row inmate Rodney Reed has maintained his innocence. Persistent questions in the case underscore why the death penalty should be abolished.
Death row inmate Rodney Reed has always maintained his innocence. The questions surrounding his case underscore the failings of the death penalty and why it should be abolished.Reed, who has been on Texas death row for 24 years, received a favorable 6-3 ruling by the U.
S. Supreme Court in April that key evidence in his case should be tested for DNA. The key piece of evidence is a belt used to strangle Stacey Stites in Bastrop in 1998. It has never been tested. Reed has always maintained his innocence. Reed, a Black man, and Stites, a white woman, were involved in a consensual sexual relationship. According to the Innocence Project, state witnesses from the original trial have “submitted affidavits stating that testimony given to Stacey’s time of death was inaccurate, making the prosecution’s timeline of Rodney allegedly killing her implausible.” Reed claims that the real killer is most likely Jimmy Fennell, Stites’ then-fiancé and a former police officer. Fennell served a 10-year sentence for a sex crime and kidnapping while on duty. He was released in 2018. This saga demonstrates how complicated death penalty cases can be. I certainly don’t know who murdered Stites, but the Supreme Court is correct: test the evidence. I have followed the death penalty closely for more than 50 years. Before retiring from the University of the Incarnate Word, I taught a course that focused solely on the death penalty. My introduction to the death penalty came as a college student when I became acquainted with a man named Bill Sands. Sands had been an inmate at San Quentin State Prison in California. As a young man, he was violent and quick to anger. He committed robberies and stole cars. He landed in San Quentin after a series of armed robberies. He was rebellious, friendless and felt that nobody cared about him. Then, Warden Clinton T. Duffy paid a visit to his cell and after listening to Sands, said, simply, “Bill, I care.”Sands did many things following prison. He had a career in professional boxing, nightclub entertainment, and insurance sales. In 1962, he found his calling - prisoner reform. He started the Seventh Step Foundation at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kan. to prepare prisoners for parole and adjustment to life outside prison. In 1964, Sands wrote “My Shadow Ran Fast,” an autobiographical account of his life in prison. It made the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for 25 weeks. It launched Sands’ appearances on the lecture circuit and television. He was charismatic and articulate. When I was in high school, he came to my hometown to give a lecture. I met him following the lecture and we quickly connected. In spring, 1969, he asked if I wanted to be part of a 19-person documentary team he was taking to Tucker Prison Farm’s death row in Arkansas. I got to know men on the row, including Lonnie B. Mitchell, Jr., prison number SK-813. Lonnie had not killed anyone. He was Black and had been convicted of raping a white woman and was sentenced to death. This was before the Supreme Court invalidated death sentences for rape. One month after the trip to Tucker, Sands had a heart attack and died at 49. I was crushed and so were many others.Now that I’ve retired, I’ve been thinking of the entire experience with Sands and how it helped shape my life. It led me to a career teaching sociology and criminology. It gave me a look at death row most people don’t have. Perhaps the biggest thing I learned from Sands was to never give up on people. Even people who have hurt others can learn to be better. It was a lesson he had learned from Duffy, who was once told by a radio commentator, “You should know that leopards don’t change their spots!” Duffy replied, “You should know that I don’t work with leopards. I work with men, and men change every day.” Duffy presided over 90 executions at San Quentin. He hated every execution, saying, “It is wrong for these people to kill and it’s wrong for the state to kill.”Roger C. Barnes is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word.
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