“They Are Going to Murder An INNOCENT Man! Does Anyone Care,?” When revolutionary organizer Gerald Smith reported to POOR Magazine’s Community Newsroom on the scheduled state sponsored murder of Rodney Reed in Texas I was brought back to another day of state sponsored murder in 2011. I was standing in a welfare line to get my food stamp re-evaluation on September 21st when the amerkkklan state of Georgia was about to murder, Troy Davis, another African descended man who, like Rodney Reed, received no justice in the kkkourts and a death penalty state was going ahead with his murder. I screamed in vain to the peoples waiting in live and no-one even looked up from their phones or paperwork.
“Rodney Reed had ineffective council - (in other words) he had a no good lawyer, “ Gerald stated to the circle of community news-makers at POOR. As Gerald was speaking I was brought back again into the same wite-supremacist vortex that denied any possible justice to Troy Davis, which included a bloody trail of public pretenders and judges asleep at the kkkourt bench, among other things.
In the case of Rodney Reed, it was a clear case of In-Justice being served to a black man in a klan town. Like life, murder and death is very complicated. The road to Rodney Reed’s conviction of murder was super-Unjust because it involved a white Po’Lice officer who was clearly the real murderer.
His court-appointed lawyers had repeatedly told the trial judge that they were not ready for trial by the time jury selection began in late March 1998. Indeed, billing records reflect that neither of Reed’s attorneys spent more than 40 hours working on the case until roughly a week before jury selection began. Nonetheless, the judge denied their requests for continuance.
After a two-week trial, the jury, which included no black members, convicted Reed. excerpt from the Intercept (full article accessible here)
After what ultimately appeared to be a rigged trial a punishment hearing followed with multiple witnesses testifying to other violations against Reed which had no business being presented to a jury deciding on adjudication of his “punishment” for a crime he didn’t commit.
On May of 1998 Reed was sentenced to death.
Since his un-just sentencing Reed and his family have maintained his innocence. Notwithstanding multiple witnesses and evidence to counter this overtly unjust ruling that have been brought forward by a lawyer with the Innocence project who is working on his case, On November 3rd the high court still rejected his petition without comment.
“Pressure helps,” Gerald cried out to us in the newsroom, explaining how a movie has been made about Rodney’s case which he has shown to multiple audiences across the country.
“He recently was in court asking for the district attorney in Bastrop Texas to test all the DNA in his case and was denied. This denial will be appealed. He has been given an execution date of March 5th, 2015.” said Pat Foley, with “The Campaign to End the Death Penalty”, who also joined us at Newsroom to speak on this state sponsored murder
“Please make phone calls to the District Attorney and sign the petition, pressure from the community is all we have until we get justice,” Gerald concluded.
You can find the online petition at change.org. Download a paper petition here. An informational fact sheet can be downloaded here.Follow Justice for Rodney Reed on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram and learn about upcoming events in the campaign to stop the execution.