02/16/15 – Jordan Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is Jordan Smith, great reporter, formerly with the Austin Chronicle, who I've read for years and years on the Yogurt Shop case, as well as this Rodney Reed story.
And she's now at the intercept with Greenwald and them.
ChronicJordan, underscore, Chronic underscore Jordan is her handle on Twitter, if you want to follow her there.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jordan?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
I'm very happy to have you on the show here.
And, you know, I meant to interview you actually about this story years ago, and I guess I'm just lazy and never got around to it.
But now we're actually, what, less than three weeks away from the execution of Rodney Reed.
And I saw where, I guess, KXAN put out a little thing last night saying that the family has now petitioned to get a new trial.
And so I guess that's at the state level.
Are there various appeals?
And I'm sorry, we'll get to the story in just a second, this innocent man on death row.
But I'm curious about the different states of appeal in the federal courts, the Supreme Court, et cetera, too.
Sure.
So there's nothing pending in federal court right now.
There's a couple of things happening at the state level.
First of all, there's a clemency petition that's been filed with the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
But in Texas, we know kind of how that goes, not very well usually, but you try anyway.
So that's pending.
And then there are a couple of appeals that are kind of wending their way through the system.
One has to do with DNA testing.
Lawyers had sought to have a bunch of additional DNA testing during a hearing back in November.
And that was denied at the trial court level.
So that denial is being appealed.
Meanwhile, there's this brand-new appeal that was filed just this last week on Thursday that's filed right with the Court of Criminal Appeals, which is Texas' highest criminal court.
And they are looking at some new scientific evidence that experts say make the state's theory of the crime medically and scientifically impossible.
Right.
And then so now it's been a little while since I took Texas government at community college here.
But in the appeals, or I guess it depends on what kind of appeal, what kind of court, but mostly it's rigged where the defendant or the convict would have to prove that something was wrong with the process originally, not necessarily that there's a preponderance of evidence to believe now that they may be guilty or something, but they have to show that the judge did something wrong or the prosecution withheld some evidence from the defense that they should have known at trial or something like that.
Is that not correct in this case?
Well, generally speaking, that's the case.
But, for example, the DNA appeal and the medical, the new forensic evidence appeal are a little bit different.
They're both kind of taking advantage of relatively recent changes to Texas law that try to give more avenues for defendants to get back into court when things have changed.
So, for example, the forensic science part is part of the changes that went into effect after Michael Morton's exoneration.
So this is a way to, when science has changed essentially, when we've evolved and we know now something that we would not necessarily have known in the past or that wasn't available, that kind of wisdom or an expert to sort of determine that, when those things aren't available, it gives you a little lever to try to get back into court.
So with this, they're saying, look, we have these really veteran medical examiners and we also have the former Austin medical examiner who's kind of changed his story on this.
It's backed up by some other really well-known guys.
And this is, we're going to try to use this valve for new and evolving science and get back into the courts.
So there are some different ways to get back in.
But, you know, you're right.
Generally speaking, when you're on appeal, you're talking about defects in your trial that kind of offend constitutional principles.
That's generally what's going on there.
Okay.
Now, so I'm sorry for starting at the end of a long and complicated story, but I wanted to try to figure out what was going on with the court system, you know, for starters here.
And we will certainly work back around to this expert testimony that's now being recanted from the medical examiner.
But I guess, you know, for now, can you rewind and take us back to 1996 and tell us who is Rodney Reed and what is he doing on death row?
Okay.
So we'll give you the summary here, which is basically that on April 23rd of 1996, a 19-year-old named Stacy Stites, who lived in Giddings with her then-fiancé, who was a rookie Giddings police officer, she is found murdered in a wooded area just about 10 miles outside of Bastrop.
She was reported missing after she failed to show up that morning for a 3.30 a.m. shift at the Bastrop AGB.
Now, the car she was driving, which belonged to her fiancé, was found about, you know, in Bastrop, about 10 miles from where her body was dumped.
And they eventually found her body because a guy picking wildflowers kind of came across it.
And so when her body was being inspected, they found, first of all, that there was semen DNA inside of her.
And because of the way she was sort of found splayed in the woods, her pants, the zipper was broken, her pants had clearly been pulled down, her underwear was sort of bunched up.
She didn't have a shirt on, but she did have a bra on.
I think there was obviously sort of a quick assumption that this was maybe a sexual assault turned violent into murder.
And the case basically revolves entirely on what her fiancé, this man named Jimmy Fennell, who, like I say, was a Giddings police officer, what he said about what happened that morning.
And specifically he said that the day before her murder that, you know, they were together alone in the apartment and everything was just hunky-dory and they were getting ready, you know, planning their wedding.
And then she goes to bed that night, he goes to bed sometime after she goes to bed, and then she leaves at like 3 in the morning to go to her shift.
And that's, you know, to drive about 30 miles, I guess, from Giddings to Bastrop.
So the entire timeline for when Stites was murdered rests entirely on Fennell.
The problem is they never actually searched the apartment.
It's really become a huge problem in this case.
The cops never sought to search the apartment that the couple shared, even though it's clearly the last place that everybody knew she was alive.
And so, you know, there might be something there that you don't even know is there, or you might find evidence that would suggest that what Fennell said happened didn't happen.
But suffice it to say, it goes unsolved for about a year, until a hunch, cops decided to compare the DNA that they had gotten from Stites to that of a man who was 29 years old at the time named Rodney Reed.
His DNA had been collected in connection with another attempted sexual assault case that was eventually dropped.
And there's a match.
So the timeline was Fennell's timeline, and then they find the DNA, and they just kind of come up with this theory of the case, which has persisted to this day, that it's kind of problematic, and that is this.
Stacy Stites is driving alone in Fennell's truck just after 3 a.m. from Giddings to Bastrop.
Along the way, she is somehow overcome by Rodney Reed, who's on foot and without a weapon.
He then kidnaps her, rapes her, dumps her in the woods, drives the car back to Bastrop, dumps it behind the high school, and then goes home.
And that is the entire theory of the case.
Now, when Reed was first arrested, he claimed that he did not know Stites and he only knew what he'd heard on the news about the murder.
And eventually he changed that, not too long actually, after being arrested, and said, look, I did know her.
In fact, we were having an affair, and basically he was afraid to say anything because he's a black man, she was a young white woman who also happened to be engaged to a white cop.
All right, now, hardy-har-har, a likely story.
But we've got to take this break.
Music's playing.
Two clarifications there.
Giddings and Bastrop, audience, these are towns east of Austin, Texas, small towns east of Austin.
And H-E-B, that's the grocery store where she worked.
That's just a Texas thing.
And right there, it's Jordan Smith, the great Jordan Smith, now at the intercept on the false prosecution of Rodney Reed sitting on Texas death row.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jordan Smith, formerly with the Austin Chronicle.
Did a lot of great work there for many years on the yogurt shop murders case, as well as this case, Rodney Reed sitting on death row for the murder of Stacey Stites.
And sorry about the heartbreak there.
They do interrupt, Jordan.
So what we have here is we have a young lady who was murdered and apparently raped, and we have the DNA of the suspect, and yet you seem to think there's a bunch of reasonable doubt here.
How's that?
Well, I think there's always been problems.
The state's theory of the crime really, to be quite honest, makes no sense to me.
As a woman, I just don't.
It's very hard to figure out how you're driving down a highway and get overtaken by a man on foot.
I don't get that.
I never have.
There's other things about the scene, too, that are disturbing.
Her fingernails are cut sort of to the quick.
That didn't make sense to me.
She's about to get married.
She also works with food.
I don't get that.
And, you know, obviously they couldn't get any sort of DNA or anything from under the fingernails.
And really the idea that Rodney was having an affair, a relationship with Stacy, was never vetted by the cops in any meaningful way, and neither was Jimmy Finnell, the fiancé.
And as it turns out, he has quite a disturbing pattern of sexual assault and stalking of women and of being very violent with minorities.
And these were things that actually had begun, the pattern had begun before Stites was even murdered and continued well on after she was murdered, even during Rodney's trial.
And none of this stuff was ever discovered by the defense, and none of it was ever raised by the police.
It's just sort of a shocking lack of investigation.
And the thing is now it looks far more likely that Finnell could have had something to do with this or is actually responsible for the murder and not Rodney.
And that kind of brings us up to what the new appeal is.
Okay, go ahead.
So Finnell, as I said, said that he was alone with her the night before she was murdered.
Now, in the new appeal, you have three of the literally best-known, most renowned forensic pathologists in the country who have all reviewed crime scene videos and pictures and autopsy and all these sort of official case documents and all agree that not only was Stites murdered hours before the state says so, which is like shortly after 3 a.m. is when they say she was killed, they say that she was probably likely murdered well before midnight and was actually just dumped in the woods.
Now, if that's the case, then that means that Finnell did it because he, by his own words, was the only one with her before midnight, the night before she was killed.
And they say that they can tell this by looking at the way blood has pooled in Stites' body post-mortem.
So, you know, after we die, our blood obviously is no longer circulating, and so it kind of follows gravity and moves to the lowest points in the body.
And although she was found on her back, there was distinct, like, lividity looks a lot like bruising, like sort of deep bruises.
So there was that sort of deep lividity all over her chest and on her face and on part of her arm that was actually facing up when they found her in the woods.
So this whole part of her body is purple, which means that she was actually killed at least four hours before they said, because it takes about four hours for lividity to set, and she was then kept in a position where she was basically slumped forward with her head down and then dumped in the woods on her back.
So there was lividity on her back because she'd been outside for a long time, but that stuff on the front was still there, and that's how they get this new timeline.
So it's pretty, I mean, it's just a scientific fact of decomposition, basically.
That stuff does not change, you know.
Right.
And better than just a reasonable doubt there.
That sounds beyond it.
Certainly.
I mean, that's in fact exactly how one of the medical examiners put it, a guy named Michael Bodden who's probably fairly well known, and he used to be the chief medical examiner in New York City, and in his affidavit he concluded not only that, you know, science says that this is the way things work, but that he is beyond reasonably, beyond his reasonable medical certainty that Reed is actually innocent of this crime.
And now, so tell us about the recanted testimony of the medical examiner.
Was it, well, whoever it was, the guy that testified at the trial about the age of the sperm that they had found.
Exactly.
So because Stice was found with Reed's DNA, they found three intact sperm, heads and tails.
So at trial, the former Austin medical examiner, a guy named Roberto Bayardo, testified as well as, along with a crime scene analyst, and basically said that sperm cannot last intact inside the vagina for more than 24 hours.
And Bayardo kind of went along with this idea that Stice was killed at some point after 3 a.m.
He has since recanted that.
He said basically that that was wrong and that he never kind of meant to even, you know, say that that was the case.
And so that kind of piggybacks the other stuff.
The reality is, and this is what the pathologists say now too, is if they'd had sex, you know, sometime just before she was murdered, you would expect to see a lot more than three sperm, basically.
So the fact that all they could find was three actually further bolsters Reed's story that the sex they'd had had been several days before.
Well, and if I remember right from the last thing that you wrote about this, well, I don't know if I read this in the Chronicle or not, but I believe it was that there are other experts in literature, in the journals, etc., that explicitly refute the idea that the tails must have had to have broken off after 24 hours.
That that is just not correct.
Absolutely.
You're absolutely right.
It's scientifically inaccurate to say that that's the case.
So you've got two things going on.
Number one, it's documented that you can find intact sperm for days, days, days, days later.
But also you've got the whole idea that all they found was three, and they made a big deal out of that.
But now when you look at it and you think, well, that doesn't make any sense.
How could you have just had sex with somebody and only have three sperm?
That just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
So, you know, all these things together, and it's taken so many years for all of these sort of pieces of information to kind of come together, and now we have a much broader picture of what might have happened in this case.
Well, now, I want to ask you about Jimmy Finnell more in a minute.
But how many people can confirm that, and maybe could back then and now, if the numbers are different, can confirm that Rodney Reed was, in fact, having an affair with this woman, rather than that's just his made-up alibi after the fact, which is what any rapist murderer would say, right?
Sure, sure.
Of course that's why.
Oh, yeah, we were having an affair.
Yeah, yeah.
So at the time, there were a number of people, but, you know, not many of them were called at trial, in fact, all but two witnesses.
And he had quite a number of witnesses who said that they knew of the affair.
The problem was, in a defensive estimation, is there were some credibility problems with some of them because some had criminal records and this and that and the other thing.
And I think part of it also is that a lot of people were people who were related to him or very close friends of the family.
I don't think that necessarily makes them not credible because, I mean, if you're doing something that's very secret, the only people that are likely to know about it are people who are very close to you, and that would be sort of your family.
But more to the point is that the cops never even went and looked to confirm or deny this whole relationship.
And so now we have, for example, there are two new people who have come forward.
They both worked with Stites at the grocery store and both say they were never questioned by police about the murders, but had they been, they would have told them what they knew.
And now they both gave details of seeing Rodney and Stacy together at the grocery store, sort of behaving affectionately.
And I think those witnesses really, you know, they don't have the same credibility problems that, you know, others might have.
You quote the one in your piece at The Intercept today.
You quote the one, or I don't know if it's a direct quote, but you have her saying that Stites had explained to her that, yeah, I'm having an affair with this guy.
Right, exactly.
She did over lunch in a break room, said that she was having an affair with this black guy named Rodney and that she didn't know what would happen if her fiancé found out.
The other co-worker kind of said that he had seen the two of them together and that she always seemed really happy when Rodney was around, but that she behaved far differently when Jimmy would come by the grocery store, that she actually would run and hide to avoid talking to him.
Okay, and now why might that be?
Can you tell us anything in the last couple of minutes here that we might need to know about Jimmy Finnell?
Well, Jimmy Finnell has a sort of a disturbing pattern of menacing, stalking, and in fact raping at least one woman while on duty as a cop, and that didn't come out until 2008.
Yeah, but you didn't just say the word allegedly.
You just said raping.
How can you be so sure?
Well, he's in prison right now for doing it.
Oh, okay, just making sure.
He raped a woman while he was working as a Georgetown cop, which is the town just north of Austin.
He raped her while he was on duty.
He put her on the back of his car.
He put his gun next to her head.
He raped her, and he's in prison for that now.
And it turns out, because of this situation that happened back in 2007 and was prosecuted in 2008, a number of other women kind of came out of the woodwork and said they'd been menaced by him and threatened with assault and all sorts of things.
So there's a really sort of disturbing picture of what Finnell is like in the world.
Hey, Jordan, listen, this is heroic work that you have been doing on this case for years now.
Thank you, and thank you for coming on the show.
Hey, thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
All right, y'all, that's Jordan Smith.
She's formerly at the Austin Chronicle, read all that stuff, and now at The Intercept.
She's got a brand new one today on this.
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