Murder charges almost always end in black or white, innocent or guilty. Life or death. There are no shades of gray on death row. That same unnatural certitude is adopted by both sides in the Reed case. His backers take the evidence in the case and see innocence.
Prosecutors take the same facts and find guilt.
The two sides start with identical pieces, but they end up with different-looking puzzles. Things got more complicated last fall when Reed, locked in his death row cell, shuffled through the response from prosecutors to one of his appeals and came upon a report he' d never seen before. He told his mother, Sandra, who told her husband, Walter, who told Reed's lawyer. Based on this new evidence, Reed asked for a judgment that would likely result in a new trial. A Bastrop County district judge heard Reed's arguments last month before a courtroom packed with anti-death penalty activists and Reed's Bastrop supporters.