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I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
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You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Jordan Smith.
Now, for many years, she was an investigative reporter for the Austin Chronicle and did such great work on the Yogurt Shop murders and all kinds of other true crime stories, bad conviction stories, especially.
And now for the last few years, she's been at the Intercept.
And one of the things that she's been really great on is the story of Rodney Reed, who is facing execution later this month for a crime that he quite obviously did not commit.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Jordan?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Who's Rodney Reed and why should anybody care about him?
Yeah, so Rodney was convicted in 1998 of murdering a 19-year-old woman named Stacy Stites.
Her body was found dumped off the side of a road out in Bastrop County.
And basically, she had been at the time was engaged to a white police officer.
They didn't even solve her murder for almost a year, which is one of the things that's always kind of fascinated me about the case.
But she was murdered in 1996.
And then in 1997, they kind of on a hunch, decided to test some DNA that belonged to Rodney Reed against semen DNA that they'd recovered from her.
And it matched.
So when Rodney was first asked about this, you know, he didn't say that he knew her.
But then shortly thereafter, kind of backed up and said, well, that was not true, that he did know her.
And in fact, he'd been having a consensual sort of affair with her, which, you know, would have been dangerous.
And it would certainly explain why he didn't confess to knowing her immediately.
And so kind of things have gone downhill from there.
It's worth noting that that there is no evidence whatsoever connecting Rodney to this crime aside from that DNA.
And I think that's really kind of important to remember because there's plenty of other evidence.
Right.
OK, so and there's so much and there's all kinds of new people coming forward now that it's almost too late and all this kind of stuff that we got to talk about.
But I want to ask you, first of all, about was just a comment that I read on one of the news stories about this.
I don't know if there's any truth to it at all, but it seemed compelling at face value anyway.
And that was that Rodney Reed's DNA was also found on her breast and on other parts of her clothes and elsewhere.
It wasn't really specific elsewhere on her body.
And that if he had, you know, according to his version of the story, had had sex with her a couple of days before that, surely she would have showered and and been clean and they wouldn't have found his DNA in any other place on her body.
But that they did and that this was enough to to cast aside those doubts.
It must have been him, this person said.
Do you know about that?
Well, yeah.
And I think that it's always been tricky because there are a lot of problems with the way the crime scene was processed to the extent that there might be DNA from him on other parts of her body.
I don't know that we've ever been able to rule out contamination.
In other words, they basically this is the side of a country road, you know, and her body's splayed out and they collect the evidence from her there.
Whereas you kind of more typically might think of, you know, that evidence being collected in a more sterile environment, i.e., like at a medical examiner's office.
But it wasn't.
So I I've never.
But that is correct, though, that they found or they say that they found his DNA elsewhere on her body.
The only thing that that that they've ever really connected him to is the semen DNA.
Although, yes, there is some allegation that there's DNA on other parts of her body.
But, you know, the big thing for them was the semen DNA.
Right.
And and at trial, there was testimony saying that that semen would not have been found.
They found intact sperm, basically heads and tails.
And there was testimony at trial that that had to have been deposited around the time of her death because sperm like that cannot survive more than 24 hours, which I always thought was so weird because it was like so oddly specific.
And it turns out that was a bunch of junk.
You know, the experts from the state, one from a DNA lab, one from the state's crime lab, both testified to that.
And it's just not true.
And in fact, in last year, I think it was both the DPS crime lab and the private DNA lab.
They had to walk back that testimony and say that it was true, that it was completely inaccurate.
So, you know, you have kind of junk science, you know, sort of bolstering this conviction.
Just to be specific, the doctor that testified at the trial has now recanted and said, I was wrong when I said my expert scientific opinion was that this sperm had to have been more recent.
That is incorrect.
But then so what did the court say about that?
Well, they haven't said much at all.
They're entirely unimpressed.
I mean, and that that doctor is the, you know, the medical examiner who who autopsied her body back in 1996 when she was killed.
And it's worth noting that not only has he walked that back, but literally like like three or four very prominent forensic pathologists have come forward to agree that, you know, not only that that is garbage, but that there are a whole lot of other problems with the state's case.
I mean, you know, it's remarkable to me, really.
I've covered this case for 18 years and it always bothered me in the beginning because it was just kind of like a problematic scenario from the beginning.
And it's literally only gotten worse over these 18 years.
It's pretty remarkable how much evidence has come out.
And I think one of the other really notable things about the sort of current moment that we're in is that a lot of people who have come forward to say that they have information that they hadn't shared before or are coming forward in a different way and sort of trying to advocate for this execution to be stopped are members of law enforcement.
Right.
I mean, it's pretty extraordinary.
So if you have the time here, please go through and explain some of those because they're really big.
And and hey, these are people who under any other circumstances would be keeping their lip buttoned and would not be throwing their own guy under the bus like this.
Right.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, so let's start there.
So, you know, there is a group.
This was pretty extraordinary, is that there is a group of former and current law enforcement officers from central Texas who basically wrote a friend of the court brief for the Supreme Court where where Rodney's case is currently, you know, one of his avenues of appeal is it's currently at the Supreme Court.
I've never I've never ever seen current and former law enforcement officers get together to say that this conviction is screwy.
And their their sort of angle on it is that to kind of point out the ways in which this case relied like fell victim to bad facts, you know, weak forensics and also law enforcement tunnel vision.
So, you know, always the most likely suspect has been Stacey's then fiance, a guy named Jimmy Finnell, who's a disgraced cop, but at that time was small town cop, you know, because he had basically access to her.
And if she was having, you know, this affair, he, you know, has variously been described as racist over the years and would not have gone over very well with him.
And so one thing that's notable about that is that early on, they knew that there was this semen DNA.
Right.
And at that point, they knew that it also that it didn't match Jimmy Finnell.
But that did not stop law enforcement early on from really trying to focus on Jimmy as a suspect.
So in other words, that at that point, the DNA was not considered the linchpin of the case, which is critical, because by the time they imagine to read, then suddenly it's dispositive of guilt.
And they totally abandoned their inquiry into Jimmy, you know, and that's a sort of it tells you that early on, they didn't really see that as being the thing that would necessarily solve this case until they matched it to a black man.
And it's a fact that the detectives working the case originally considered him to be the prime suspect.
And as you're saying, then, when they had this DNA evidence that pointed somewhere else, at least that she had been having intercourse with someone else, that they went, OK, well, still, we still think it's him, at least up until we find out better.
And then but what it was, though, right, was that Reed had the reason they had his DNA to compare was because there was a complaint of a sexual assault by another woman against him.
And so you could sort of understand why they went, OK, well, if the guy likes raping people and we have his DNA, maybe this is the easy solution to our question here.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, absolutely.
And, you know, there's in capital trials in Texas, you know, you have the guilt and innocence phase, right, where you're putting on evidence to try to prove the guilt or innocence for the crime at hand.
And then you skip to the punishment phase where you decide whether you're going to put somebody to death.
And in that phase of the trial, it's like a free for all.
Basically, anything that you have literally ever been even accused of doing can come in to kind of suggest how irredeemable you are.
And at that point, the state in Rodney's case brought in a handful of women who had been sexually assaulted, some of whom hadn't even seen their attacker, but put this in to suggest that Reed had this pattern of of raping women.
And it's very when you read those punishment phase transcripts there, what's totally clear is that these women were victims of very traumatizing and violent sexual attacks.
But it's also really clear that up until this point, law enforcement had basically done about nothing to investigate them, including one of them was a 12 year old girl who'd been raped back in 1989.
So it didn't seem like they did very much with them until right now they could weaponize those stories in a way that kind of made it look like there was some resolution to them.
But I think it's worth noting that they didn't really seem to pay them much heed until that point when they could basically turn them into use to put a black man on death row.
Well, and for a crime that the fellow law enforcement officer was the far more likely one to have committed, which is convenient for them to question.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, and like you were saying before, there are others.
So aside from the folks, the group of law enforcement officers that basically come out on their own to sort of support Reed's petition before the Supreme Court.
There are also cops who have chipped holes in Jimmy's story that he had nothing to do with this.
I mean, there was a guy named Curtis Davis, who is a law enforcement officer with Finnell, who basically told CNN's death row stories, basically challenged Finnell's timeline of what happened the night before Stites was killed and said that basically what Jimmy had said about his whereabouts that night were not true.
There are two additional law enforcement officers that have come forward, one with a really rather disturbing account of seeing Finnell at the funeral home, sort of standing over Stites' body and making some comments like you got what you deserved.
And then a third one who has very recently come forward, who was actually very close with Jimmy and with Stacey and remembered a time like sort of in the late spring of 1996.
So in other words, maybe a month or so before she was murdered, being over at their apartment complex and Stacey going off to the pool and he and Jimmy standing next to like this barbecue pit and getting ready to cook.
And he like comes out with this whole thing that that, you know, he's pretty sure she's CNN.
And it's like this guy was totally disturbed by that, obviously.
And then after that, after Stacey died, he said that he saw increasingly erratic and disturbing behaviors from Finnell and finally cut off all communication with him.
And he says that, you know, he did not come forward at the time because he ended up leaving law enforcement in central Texas and he ended up moving out of the area.
But he still had family in Bastrop and he did not want to be perceived as going against law enforcement, which, again, you know, that's completely legit.
I mean, that's how I'm it's not a surprising tale, you know, but they do definitely call into question all the things that we thought we knew about this case.
And, you know, worth noting is that the entire timeline leading up to Stites' murder is provided to law enforcement by Finnell.
He basically says, you know, we were at home all night before she was murdered.
She had to get up early to go to work and she would get up at 3 a.m., although I didn't actually get up when she got up and she would have left then.
And sort of this she would have driven this way to work, like every single thing about what they eventually have as their theory of the crime is provided by Finnell.
But but they never like searched his apartment.
There's just like all these inexplicable missteps that really allowed this narrative of the crime to take hold.
And it's frankly a narrative that doesn't really make all that much sense anyway, because it's it's puts her in Finnell's pickup truck, you know, driving from Giddings to Bastrop, which is about a 30 minute drive to this grocery store where she was working.
And the theory of the crime is she's driving along a state highway in this truck somewhere and somehow Reed is on foot, overcomes her in this car driving down a highway, gets in there, you know, rapes her, strangles her, dumps her on the side of the road, drives the car, you know, to the Bastrop High School parking lot and then locks it up and walks away.
It just never made sense to me how at 3 a.m. driving on a state highway, someone on foot could overcome you.
And it's sort of like even to the extent that you might have been stopped at a stoplight, it's 3 a.m.
You're going to drive through it.
And if there was traffic at 3 a.m., it seems even less likely that somebody could pull off this, you know, hijacking on foot.
They're conceding that they knew each other and that she opened the door and gave him a ride.
It's still there's not much motive for him to rape and murder her when if she was willing to let him in, you know, in the first place.
Well, right.
Exactly.
That's totally true.
And, you know, what's also sort of notable about that scenario is that when they find the truck parked there, you know, it's obviously it's processed for evidence.
And there are there's absolutely nothing in that truck that connects Reed to the truck at all, including fingerprints.
But there are a bunch of fingerprints from both Jimmy and from Stacey.
So it's hard to imagine a scenario where he would have been smart enough to either wear gloves and or wipe off his prints, which I don't know how he would do that necessarily without wiping the other ones away, but then would leave his DNA behind.
And it just doesn't make a lot of sense, you know.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Now, so talk a little bit about the forensics about the bruising on her body and the essentially ironclad proof that her body was moved hours after she was killed.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
So, you know, the state's original theory is this whole driving down the street, driving down the highway and, you know, hijacked by Rodney Reed on foot.
But what the medical examiners have basically come out in recent years very strongly is that when her body is found, it's found lying face up.
And yet there is a bunch of sort of dark patches of what kind of looks like bruising right on the front of her body.
And what that is, is what they call postmortem mortem lividity.
And that's basically when you die, your blood obviously stops circulating and then it begins to pool and it gets pulled by gravity down to the lowest part of the body.
And it sort of makes these big pockets of stain that look like bruise.
So if she was attacked that morning and it takes about four hours for lividity to set in.
So she was attacked that morning and dumped on her back.
You would expect to see that lividity on her back by the time she's found.
Instead, it's all in the front of her body.
And so at that point, the doctors say, well, that's impossible then for her to have been, you know, murdered at three in the morning.
It had to take place somewhere well before midnight when and then her body had to be left in sort of a slumped over state to kind of produce that line of lividity.
Which, if you believe Fennell's story that he was a home alone with her that night, then he basically puts himself squarely at home with her at the time of the murder.
There is also one other interesting piece of evidence from the truck that kind of goes along well with this sort of scenario, which is on the sort of floorboard on the passenger side was a bunch of sort of frothy fluid.
And it was obviously decompositional fluid from a body.
So and it would be coming out of the nose and mouth.
So that is basically suggest that she was slumped over forward in the truck, perhaps at some point during this whole scenario.
And that matches far more and makes a lot more sense than this sort of walking along at 3 a.m. and hijacking a woman in a car.
Now, Jordan, isn't it right that this Jimmy Fennell just got out of prison for something or another?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jimmy Fennell just got out of prison last year.
He did 10 years after pleading guilty to kidnapping and improper sexual contact with a person while on duty.
And basically what that was is that he raped a woman while he was in duty and in uniform at gunpoint on the back of his car.
This is a woman named Connie Lear.
And this happened to her in 2007.
He sort of when what ended up happening was when when all of this stuff came out about Connie Lear and and and and Fennell having raped her.
It basically unlocked a whole bunch of police records that show that other women had made credible allegations of sexual harassment by Fennell or improper contact, you know, a sexual contact while he was on duty.
And then essentially other cops knew about it and it was all just, you know, just ignored.
So we had a predator, you know, in uniform on the street with credible accusations of attacking women that finally end up in this like really terrifying rape case that thankfully Connie Lear came forward.
I mean, after he raped her, he basically threatened her and said if she were to tell anybody and if he was to end up in prison, he would come back.
He would get his gun.
He would hunt her down and he would kill her.
So she was terrified and she fled Texas.
She left, you know, and like kind of went to the time when I was talking to her.
I mean, I knew where she was, but she really wasn't telling anybody where she was, which is still understandable.
I mean, she was legitimately terrified of this man.
And so, you know, he's out walking the streets right now, as they say.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes, yes.
And of course, no question why the Williamson County Sheriff's Department had no, no problem whatsoever hiring this guy who everyone in the world already knew as a murderer.
Yeah, he worked for Georgetown.
Exactly.
He worked for Georgetown.
He was from Georgetown.
So, you know, presumably.
No, they don't get the Austin Chronicle up there.
See?
There you go.
Now, so here's another one that's a really important part of this case, right, is this new witness that worked at the grocery store with Stacey Stites, who said that she knew that she was having an affair because the prosecution is trying to dispute this.
Right.
And saying, oh, yeah, sure.
Witnesses come forward later saying that she was having an affair with this guy.
But they want us to believe there's no other reason in the world why his DNA should be inside her.
But I guess if you can tell us about that.
And also, I'm curious, there are other people, too, right, that are verifying and corroborating the fact that they were, in fact, having an affair behind Fennell's back.
Yeah, absolutely.
So Reed had obviously this claim early on.
And fortunately, his lawyers, who were completely unprepared, didn't follow through on providing evidence that could, you know, shore up this affair story.
In part, they didn't call someone because they were related to Reed.
But subsequently, over the last number of years, and this is a steady drip, there's not just one.
There are people wholly unconnected to Reed who have said, yes, we knew that Stacey was having an affair.
One woman that she worked with had a very particular conversation with Stacey in the break room at the grocery store, where she says Stacey even said that she was seeing this guy named Rodney.
There are other employees that knew that she had been seeing other people and that she did not seem happy and seemed sort of, you know, frightened of Fennell, you know.
And so, you know, these are people that are obviously not connected to Reed.
It's also worth noting that there are members of Stacey's family who have said that they were aware that she was having a relationship with who they think was Rodney.
And that they also, there are members of that family that really think this should all be stopped because they don't think that the cops got it right in the first place.
Yeah.
Well, which is huge in itself right there.
The victim's family casting their doubts.
I mean, imagine somebody murders your daughter and it's a cop murders her and blames it on some black guy and gets away with it.
I mean, how much they feel about that?
This guy's out there doing whatever he wants with, you know, virtual impunity.
Ten years for raping some other lady, but that's nothing compared to taking their daughter's life, you know?
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, one of the really things that's always been really interesting, too, is that if you look at the, you look at the sort of law enforcement, the police records related to the investigation.
And there are a bunch of notes from from Stacey's family members, one including a written statement from her mom.
And then another one is a sort of a list of stuff that her sisters were writing down.
And they're all deeply, deeply suspicious of Jimmy at this point.
And you can tell they had real concerns about him for a number of reasons early on.
But by the time you get to trial, it's sort of like he was this, you know, wonderful person.
Their attitudes completely shifted.
And so it's interesting that I think, you know, clearly they had deep concerns about his culpability early on.
But then again, once this sort of DNA match comes in, that sort of takes Jimmy off the table in a way that really wasn't warranted, I don't think.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things was they never tested the belt that they say she was strangled with to see whose DNA was on that.
Well, right.
And, you know, it's really frustrating.
The state, you know, the state has a very good post-conviction DNA testing law.
And but, you know, too often prosecutors fight to to really kind of disallow that testing.
And then the courts, you know, sort of horribly sort of back that up.
And here, you know, they have these case.
Well, this is sort of braided pieces of this braided belt, which are found one near the truck and one near her body.
And then on her neck, at least across the front part of her neck, is, you know, some markings that would seem to be consistent with the pattern of that belt.
So obviously, let's test it.
You're saying that's the murder weapon.
If the perpetrator were to have strangled her with that, almost certainly there would be some genetic trace of this person.
But the state has sort of variously said, well, you know what, it was improperly stored or too many people have handled it.
You know, I'm just not very impressed by that argument, because, number one, if you improperly stored that evidence, that's on you, state.
You have the duty to safeguard that stuff.
Number two, to the extent that people were handling it, i.e. at trial or during the investigation, you would think that the majority of those people are going to be law enforcement and prosecutors that should be relatively easy to eliminate if they come up in some sort of DNA mixture on the belt.
So, you know, there's just been really no good reason not to do it.
It's always sort of mystified me as to why they don't want to just test it, test the damn thing, because if you're right, that is dispositive right there.
You know, if Rodney Reed's DNA comes up on the belt, then it's all over and yet they won't go there.
And I just don't understand that.
Yeah.
They're afraid what it looks like.
And now.
So do I understand it right then that the whichever was the last court to rule on this?
It was the Texas Supreme Court or it was some federal court or I don't know which one you help me out ruled that.
Yeah, well, I don't care because all of these amicus briefs and all this new testimony and all of these things and this obvious counter narrative here, none of that is likely to have made a difference at trial, according to us.
So it doesn't not good enough.
Essentially, that's essentially what's going on.
There's it's sort of there's a kind of weird little sort of technical issue here.
Let's back up to say that the court that has really been most hostile is the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is the highest criminal court in the state.
And they have a well-deserved reputation of being very results oriented, and I would suggest not very intellectually sort of honest or curious and without much real sort of guiding wisdom as to how they interpret these cases, which is why you'll see in Texas.
Somebody will get a stay, then somebody is similarly situated, won't.
And there's just no real good, solid way, methodical way in which they approach these cases.
And that's because they are just looking at it.
You know what they want the result to be.
And I know that sounds not right.
But if you spend a lot of time looking at these cases, it's the only conclusion you can come to.
And there's a way in which they seem to have approached Reid's case, which sort of allows them to do that, which is over the years, you'd file like a writ of habeas corpus, which is essentially a special kind of appeal outside the normal appellate process where you raise constitutional violations in order to challenge somebody's detention.
And and there's a lot of rules around how writs can be filed.
So that's true.
And it can be hyper technical.
But so Bryce Benjette, who has been Rodney Reid's lawyer for as long as I've been reporting on the case, about 18 years, you know, has been really diligent with his team in investigating and reinvestigating.
And that's how all this new information has come up.
So he'll file a big writ.
Right.
But a lot of times the court of criminal appeal on those cases.
I mean, there was one.
I mean, he sat for years on some of these writs.
So in the meantime, when new evidence comes up, what are you supposed to do?
Sit on it and wait.
Or do you file a supplement?
So Bryce's sort of strategy has always been to write up that evidence as soon as it's shored up and and sort of file it as a as a supplement to the writ, the main writ.
But what the court has done instead is consider each one of those new filings a brand new writ.
And what that has allowed them to do, at least from the outside looking in, is that then they're able to consider each one of those little pieces of evidence in isolation, as opposed to sort of a cumulative, universal look at how all these things fit together and how they challenge the conviction.
Right.
So, in other words, you could get the woman from H.E.B. saying, look, I knew about I knew about this affair.
She said his name was Rodney.
And they can just look at that sort of on its own and be like, well, that doesn't really overcome all this other stuff.
Right.
So it's like but as opposed to looking at that in line with the other law enforcement officers that have come forward in in in conjunction with the medical examiner's evidence, you know, all this stuff, looking at it together, paints a really damning picture of this case.
But they have chosen deliberately to go the other direction.
And I think it's something that is just shameful.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but they're premeditated murderers.
Well, they are murderers.
So Governor Abbott, he knows every bit of this.
I know everybody's tweeting him all damn day about it, but he's going to let this execution take place this month.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I it's it's it's sort of great.
I mean, I do really appreciate that there's like Kim Kardashian West, who is taking this nice plunge into criminal justice reform, which, you know, there's always room at the party.
Hell yeah.
Come on in.
You know, but she's got 62 and a half million Twitter followers.
She has tweeted about this case and at Abbott trying to stop it.
Mark Cuban has there was two hours on the Dr. Phil show.
So people have a much it's always, you know, some of us have always found it sort of strange that this case has never gotten more national attention.
It's so crazy.
But to the extent that there there are there is now that is great.
And I definitely think that's wonderful.
However, at the same time, it's hard to think of a character sort of less sympathetic to such pleas for mercy than than Greg Abbott.
You know, he since being governor, 47 people have been executed.
He's intervened once.
And before that, he was the attorney general for like 14 years and or 12 years.
At that time, there were 240, 200 and some executions, 240 something, I think.
And again, as a G, you know, it was his office fighting against these appeals, including in Rodney's case.
So, you know, I don't know if I'd count on Abbott to save the day here.
However, to be fair, it is worth noting that like basically all that Abbott can do is grant a temporary reprieve unless and until the Board of Pardons and Paroles were to suggest some other sort of clemency.
But then again, the Board of Pardons and Paroles is staffed by members appointed by the governor.
So doesn't he have the power to give clemency or say reduce the sentence from death to life in prison until a new trial can be held or some kind of thing like that?
No, he can only grant a reprieve, like a temporary reprieve from execution.
It's the Board of Pardons and Paroles which can make.
So what he can do is if the Board of Pardons and Paroles thinks that this sentence should be commuted or some form of clemency should be granted, they would have to recommend it to Abbott.
And then it's up to Abbott whether or not he wants to take them up on that.
But he can't actually do anything to ease this sentence without a recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles to do so.
But again, that's what I'm saying.
But it's like, oh, so on the one hand, you're like, oh, his hands are tied.
But on the other hand, it's the governor that appoints the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
All he has to do is give a statement and say, listen, Board of Pardons and Paroles, I want you to do what I say on this because it's the right thing to do.
And they're going to do exactly what he wants.
Right.
But it totally gives, you know, that whole thing gives it, you know, the sort of, well, my hands are tied.
Can't do it if they don't say it.
You know, so it's cynical.
And now what about the U.S. Supreme Court at this point?
So there is, you know, there obviously there's a petition challenging this conviction pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
And they're still I think when I just looked the other day and they are slated to conference the case on November the 15th.
So just the Friday before the execution is scheduled for the following Wednesday.
So not much time, but, you know, there's a lot to read and hopefully they'll, you know, I mean, they're going to conference it on the 15th.
This gives them a little bit of time to try to digest some of this.
And also you would hope to kind of get some public attention to it that makes sort of amplifies the concerns about the case, you know, so that it certainly will hopefully get enough attention or the attention that it finally deserves.
The whole thing is just crazy.
The fact that we're even having this conversation is just completely nuts.
This guy who's got, you know what, maybe I can't convict Jimmy Finnell right now beyond a reasonable doubt, although I think I probably could.
But to deny that there's reasonable doubt in the case of Rodney Reed's guilt here, the idea that we're even talking about that this guy even could be put to death, in fact, is most likely to be executed by the state of Texas within a couple of weeks from now.
When essentially everybody knows he didn't really do this and that the murderer cop is getting away.
And then, I mean, what avenues, how many Jordan Smith articles have to be written to make this stop?
It should have just been the one.
But seriously, it ain't right.
And I know you know that.
That's why you report on it so much.
And that's why I'm so mad because I read all the stuff that you wrote.
Well, no, I'm glad.
I'm glad you have that kind of fury about it because it's just it's maddening.
It's maddening.
But yeah.
Anyway, sorry.
I'm just ranting and raving all over your interview now, Jordan.
No, you're good.
It's fine by me.
It's completely nuts.
So I know I'll make that in the form of a question.
Ain't I right about all that?
No, I'm just kidding.
Thank you again for coming back on the show.
You have been a hero of mine for so many years, long before you knew that I've been reading you in The Chronicle here.
And you're just such a great exemplar of what a journalist is supposed to be.
So thank you again.
We are very kind.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that is Jordan Smith, formerly with The Chronicle, now at The Intercept.
And you can read her all about Rodney Reed, four or five different articles about Rodney Reed.
I'm sure if you just Google him up and including two previous interviews on this show from, I think, back in 2015 or so on the issue as well.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
