Did Rodney Reed get a fair trial? Dr. Phil says 'hell no'

Rodney Reed and the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites took to the national stage last week in a two-episode feature on the "Dr. Phil" talk show.

The episodes featured interviews of Reed’s defense attorneys, a friend and family member of Stites, forensic experts and a behind-the-glass interview with Reed from within the Polunsky Unit, where Texas houses its male death row inmates in Livingston. After Phil McGraw and his producers’ analysis of the case — in which Reed and his supporters have claimed his innocence for decades — McGraw sided in favor of the man who has sat on death row since his 1998 conviction in Bastrop County.

“I don’t think it’s a question of whether he’s guilty or not guilty. I think the question is whether he had a full trial, with a full airing of all the evidence,” McGraw said during the episode’s closing comments. “I think the answer to that question, in my opinion, is not just no, but hell no."

McGraw's in-studio audience agreed with his assessment. In a straw poll conducted among audience members near the end of the two-part episode — which dug into the possible culpability of Stites’ former fiancé Jimmy Fennell as the possible killer — 99% thought Reed was not guilty.

“Thankfully there are courts for this,” said Fennell’s attorney Bob Phillips, who represented Fennell during his 2007 conviction for the kidnapping and sexual assault of a woman in his custody while he worked as a Georgetown police officer.

Phillips was the only person interviewed during the segment that supported Reed’s conviction. Stites’ sisters, who also support Reed’s conviction, declined to appear on the show and instead issued a statement that said “an elaborate story has been created trying to blame my sister’s murder on her fiancé.”

The show’s producers did not reach out to Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz nor did they directly contact the Texas attorney general’s office, although a spokesperson with the show said the AG’s office was informed of the segment by Stites’ sisters. The governor’s office was also contacted three times, but producers never received a response.

“I think it’s very telling about the theme of the episode when no one reached out to the state for their input,” Goertz said.

“Dr. Phil weighing in on a criminal justice matter is of no significance to the criminal justice system and only tarnishes (Dr. Phil’s) credibility as a doctor,” Goertz added.

The episodes touched on every chapter of the Reed case, from the rape and sexual assault accusations Reed faced prior to Stites’ death — none of which resulted in a conviction — to the two witnesses Reed’s attorneys brought forward this month in a last-minute attempt to halt his execution.

In July, a state judge ordered Reed to be executed Nov. 20.

The show interviews also included Kevin Gannon, a retired detective with the New York Police Department, forensic victimologist Lee Gilberston and Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist and medical examiner. All of them pushed forward a theory that Gannon has long elevated — that it is scientifically impossible to conclude that Reed could have raped and killed Stites at the time the state prosecutors argued he did. Reed became a suspect after investigators discovered three of this degraded sperm cells in Stites’ body. The degraded condition of the sperm cells would indicate that Reed had sex with Stites days before her body was found, which would support Reed’s claim that he and Stites were involved in a consensual relationship, Gannon said.

Instead, Gannon and the other experts point to Fennell as the killer. In the episode, they theorize that it was Fennell who grabbed Stites from behind with a belt around her neck, then held her head in a bathtub full of water.

“As far as I’m concerned, it was a drowning,” Gannon said. He also argues that it was Fennell, who was a Giddings police officer when Stites was killed, who dumped Stites’ body where investigators found it.

Phillips pushed back on that claim and said Stites’ mother lived next door to her daughter's and Fennell’s apartment and heard Stites leave the apartment in the early morning hours on her way to work the day she was killed. If Fennell killed Stites and then took her body to the car to dump her, she would have heard the disturbance and Fennell’s return, Phillips said. Instead, Stites’ mother, like her sisters, firmly believes Reed is the killer. Phillips called Gannon and Reed’s defense attorneys theory “ludicrous.”

“No judge, no court has given credence to any of this,” he said.

It’s unclear how the episodes’ may affect Reed’s appeals to halt his execution, which have been filed in state district court and at the U.S. Supreme Court. Reed’s attorney, Bryce Benjet of the Innocence Project, said the show’s interest in the case and McGraw’s conclusion demonstrates that any outside scrutiny of this case reveals an alarming level of injustice.

“When neutral, middle-of-the-road people look at this case, it does not hold water,” Benjet said. “I think this (show) is a reflection that proceeding towards an execution in this case is not consistent with ordinary values and common sense.”