 |
Susan Reed | |
|---|---|
| Born | Susan D. Reed September 28, 1950 (age 71) San Antonio, Texas United States |
| Occupation | attorney, judge |
Susan D. Reed (born September 28, 1950) was the Criminal District Attorney of Bexar County, Texas from 1998 to January 3, 2015. She is a member of the Republican Party.
Reed was elected District Attorney of Bexar County (San Antonio) in 1998, becoming the first woman to hold the office. She served as Judge of the 144th District Court (San Antonio) from 1986 to 1998. She served as an Assistant District Attorney for Bexar County from 1974 to 1982, including duties as chief prosecutor for court districts 144 and 187. Reed was in private practice from 1982 to 1986, with the firm Soules and Reed, specializing in business litigation.
During her tenure as a 144th District Court Judge, she helped create a "Gang Unit" in the Adult Probation department. As Bexar County District Attorney, she has created a new "Elder Fraud Unit" and successfully lobbied the Texas Legislature to increase penalties for crimes against the elderly. Reed is a member of the National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women. She was appointed to the Criminal Justice Policy Council for Governor Bill Clements. Later, Governor George W. Bush appointed her to serve on the Governor’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Board. She continued to serve on that board under Governor Rick Perry. [1]
Susan Reed was defeated by Democrat Nicholas "Nico" LaHood on November 4, 2014 during the midterm elections by a margin of 48 to 51 percent, respectively. Lahood went against Reed back in 2010, but was defeated by a margin of 54-46 percent. LaHood was supported in 2014 by 1.5 million dollars from Thomas J Henry, a personal injury lawyer who had ties to lawyers Reed had indicted for barratry. See Bexar County Elections Department COH reports.
The 1985 conviction and 1993 execution of Ruben Cantu were the subject of a series of investigative articles by Houston Chronicle reporter Lise Olsen in 2005 and 2006. In these articles, Olsen claimed to have uncovered evidence that undermined the Cantu conviction. According to Olsen, the jury forewoman, the then-district attorney, the trial judge, the co-defendant, and the surviving victim all expressed misgivings about the outcome of the Cantu case. The only evidence linking Cantu to the crime was the testimony of Juan Moreno, the surviving victim, but he since recanted his testimony, claiming he had felt threatened by police. [2]
As the district attorney, Susan Reed investigated the claims of wrongful conviction in the Cantu case. The investigation was to determine if Moreno should be charged with murder by perjury. Her office concluded that Cantu was justifiably executed in 1993 and that no credible evidence existed to support the witnesses' claims of innocence. The report concluded that Moreno had been induced to change his testimony by those seeking to undermine the integrity of Cantu's conviction. [3]
Many of Reed's critics called into question the validity and objectivity of her investigation because, as a state district judge, Susan reviewed one of Cantu's appeals and signed his death warrant. [4]
Cameron Todd Willingham was an American man who was convicted and executed for the murder of his three young children by arson at the family home in Corsicana, Texas, on December 23, 1991. Since Willingham's 2004 execution, significant controversy has arisen over the legitimacy of the guilty verdict and the interpretation of the evidence that was used to convict him of arson and murder.
Ruben Montoya Cantu was a Texan who was executed for a murder committed when he was 17 years old. During the years following the conviction, the surviving victim, the co-defendant, the district attorney, and the jury forewoman have made public statements that cast doubt on Cantu's guilty verdict.
Henry Watkins "Hank" Skinner is a death row inmate in Texas. In 1995, he was convicted of bludgeoning to death his live-in girlfriend, Twila Busby, and stabbing to death her two adult sons, Randy Busby and Elwin Caler. On March 24, 2010, twenty minutes before his scheduled execution, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay of execution to consider the question of whether Skinner could request testing of DNA his attorney chose not to have tested at his original trial in 1994. A third execution date for November 9, 2011, was also ultimately stayed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on November 7, 2011.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Frederick Salem Zain was a forensic laboratory technician in West Virginia and Bexar County, Texas, who falsified serology results to obtain convictions.
The Jeanine Nicarico murder case was a complex and influential homicide investigation and prosecution in which two men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, both Latinos, were wrongfully convicted of abduction, rape and murder in 1985 in DuPage County, Illinois. They were both sentenced to death. The case was scrutinized during appeals for being weak in evidence.
Sharon Faye Keller is the Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. She is a Republican.
Craig Marcus Watkins is an American lawyer. He was the district attorney for the Dallas County, Texas in the United States from 2007 to 2015. He became the first elected African American district attorney in Texas after he was elected in 2006.
Walter "Johnny D." McMillian was a pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His conviction was wrongfully obtained, based on police coercion and perjury. In the 1988 trial, under a controversial Alabama doctrine called "judicial override", the judge imposed the death penalty, although the jury had voted for a sentence of life imprisonment.
The wrongful conviction of Steve Titus was a miscarriage of justice in which Steve Gary Titus (1949–1985), an American businessman, was convicted wrongly of rape. Titus was dismissed from his job after the conviction and, though the charges were soon dismissed, he became long term unemployed. The crime was later determined to have been committed by serial rapist Edward Lee King. Journalist Paul Henderson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for his work on the case. Jack Olsen's book Predator examined the investigation of the crime and the life of the real criminal.
Michael Roy Toney was charged and wrongfully convicted in 1999 for a bombing that killed three people and injured two others in Lake Worth, Texas, in 1985. Toney was sentenced to death and spent ten years on death row. On December 17, 2008, Toney's conviction was vacated by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals because of prosecutorial misconduct. Toney was released from custody in September 2009 and died in a car accident about a month later.
Clarence Arnold Elkins Sr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, and the rape and assault of his wife's niece, Brooke Sutton. He was convicted solely on the basis of the testimony of his wife's six-year-old niece who testified that Elkins was the perpetrator.
Barbara Parker Hervey is a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals; she holds the Place 7 seat.
The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.
Investigating Innocence is a nonprofit wrongful conviction advocacy organization that provides criminal defense investigations for inmates in the United States. Investigating Innocence was founded in 2013 by private investigator Bill Clutter to assist nationwide Innocence Project groups in investigating innocence claims. "Once we have a case that meets our criteria, we'll put private investigators to work on it. A lot of these cases need investigators," said Kelly Thompson, executive director of Investigating Innocence. Prior to his work on Investigating Innocence, Clutter was one of the founders of the Illinois Innocence Project. Investigating Innocence also has a board composed of exonerees that reviews incoming cases.
Nicolas "Nico" LaHood is a former Criminal District Attorney of Bexar County, Texas.
Louis N. Scarcella is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who initially came to prominence during the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s and 1990s, earning frequent commendations before many of his investigations were overturned in the 2010s. As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases. Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct that resulted in false testimony against crime suspects, meaning that innocent parties could be serving long prison terms and guilty individuals could be going free because of wrongful procedures.
Sid Harle is an American Judge and Republican Politician who presided over several high-profile cases, including 20 death penalty cases, the sentencing of a police officer accused of sexual assault, awarding the death penalty to a youth pastor who murdered a pregnant woman, and also the exoneration of Michael Morton after 25 years of wrongful imprisonment.
Rodney Rodell Reed is an American death row inmate who was convicted on May 18, 1998 by a Bastrop County District Court jury for the April 23, 1996 abduction, rape, and murder of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old resident of Giddings, Texas.
Melissa Elizabeth Lucio is the first woman of Hispanic descent to be sentenced to death in U.S. state of Texas. She was convicted of capital murder after the death of her two-year-old daughter, Mariah, who was found to have scattered bruising in various stages of healing, as well as injuries to her head and contusions of the kidneys, lungs and spinal cord. Prosecutors said that Mariah's injuries were the result of physical abuse, while Lucio's attorneys say that her death was caused by a fall down the stairs two days prior.