BASTROP — The Rodney Reed hearing ended Thursday with prosecutors presenting witnesses in an effort to prove Reed had a history of violence toward women, including one who said he raped her in 1995.
A defense attorney said the judge should not consider the rape testimony or the testimony of another woman who testified Thursday that Reed assaulted her in 1996, because Reed had not faced trial in either charge.
Reed was convicted of capital murder in Stacey Stites' strangulation death in 1998 and received the death penalty. Stites' body was found by the side of a rural road in Bastrop County on April 23, 1996, with Reed's sperm in her. Before she died, Stites had planned to marry her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, then a Giddings police officer.