Update on Curtain & Reed, Plus Trump's Execution Spree

we're up to. So we've had a few people messaging, emailing and contacting me and asking what's happening with Curtain's case. As we discussed in previous episodes, Kevin is out of prison and doing very well. And the final step we have is preparing and submitting Kevin's application or petition for a pardon to the Governor General. And I just want to give a little bit of clarity because not many

people understandably know about the pardons process in Australia. There's been very very few, and even less in the State

of Queensland. For those who would like to look into it further, you can go on to Google and if you search the State of Queensland and the Criminal Code of eighteen ninety nine, the section that deals with pardons is section six seven to two A. And I'll just give you a quick rundown of what that says, which is that it basically bestows upon the Governor the ability to refer the whole case to the Court of Criminal Appeal and the case shall be heard and determined by

the court, as in the case of any person who's

been convicted who has submitted an appeal alternity. What we saw in the case of Billy Kipper that was well publicized is that the Governor can also seek the assistance of the Crown Law Officer and so that is the Crown Solicitor Office in the State of Queensland, and they sort of act like a private law firm, except that they work for the State of Queensland independently and provide advice to the Queensland Government, the government's agencies and other

areas where the government has responsibility, and they also are able to provide advice to the Governor General on issues. So we we're up to basically is ensuring that we have all the evidence that shows Kevin's innocence and that that's present, dinner, easy to read, easy to understand way for the Governor and for the Crown Solicitor if they

should need further advice. So that includes everything from all the forensic material, the witness statements, the issues in regards to the trial itself as well as the appeal and also as regular listeners would know the conduct of Queensland police, and we hope in the future to also discuss more

about forced confessions and coersion. And anyone who's watching all these new true crime documentaries on Netflix listening to the podcast will be hearing that this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and just in the state of Queensland. In recent weeks we've heard of an Aboriginal man who was convicted of a crime even though there was CCTV showing he didn't do it. Now thankfully he has been released.

But again you have serious police misconduct leading to the imprisonment of Aboriginal people and this is something we'll go into further. So I hope in the next month to six weeks i'll be able to give you an update as to exactly what the petition says and that it's

been submitted to the Governor. But in the meantime, Kevin is doing very well and once again we want to thank everyone for their support of his continuing struggle to completely free his name, and I also want to pay my respects to the elders of his family and of the Rockhampton and Worabinda communities. In a case that we've spoken about previously on the podcast and number of times. That's the case of Rodney Reid, who's on death row

for a crime didn't commit in Texas. And I should also mention that both Kevin and Rodney are aware of one another and ask how each other are doing and aware of each other's cases. Obviously very similar circumstances, police corruption, complete, no evidence against either of them, and yet they've lost years of their lives in prison for crimes they didn't commit. Now, Rodney read, as you will know, is still on death row in the US, and he was due for a

new hearing in September of this year. Now, unfortunately, that appeal hearing was then pushed back to February next year, and today we've just had the news that the twenty first District Court has now pushed that appeal hearing back to May seventeen. Now, the court's reasoning behind that is

because of the COVID nineteen pandemic. And what I need to explain to people is that given the sheer numbers of COVID deaths and infections in the United States, it shouldn't come as a surprise that this has spread like wildfire through the prisons right across the United States, and hundreds and hundreds of prisoners have died as a result of this mismanagement of the pandemic in the United States, and the prison where Rodney is held is no different.

Many prisoners have died and Rodney's just doing his very best to stay well and stay positive. Now again, Kim Kardashian, who I think everyone will know, has been providing support to Rodney and keeping his case known. And in the United States. Today Friday, we are the eleventh of December. The ABC program called twenty twenty, which is in a current affairs style program and an investigative program, will spend their entire episode looking at Rodney Reid's case and what

exactly has happened to Rodney Now. To give you an idea of how popular that show is in the United States, previous hosts have been people like Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, John Stossel, Chris Cuomo, who you might have seen on CNN now who works for CNN, Katie Couric, the news anchor, Heraldo Rivera, Chris Wallace who's a well known journalist, Martin Basheer, who is known you would have seen him do interviews

with people like Lady Die before she passed away. So this is a very big program in the United States and we do believe that it will be repeated in Australia. So when that happens, I'll post to the Curtain the podcast, Facebook page and Twitter account and get the word out so that you can see that program for yourselves. And I'll also find a link where it's available to watch online for those who aren't able to see it as

it goes to air. So this is going to be a really important time for Rodney's case where you have tens of millions of Americans tuning in, and once again the evidence will point to Stacy's fiance, the ex police officer who was already found guilty of kidnap and sexual assault, the man who was with Stacy when she was murdered, and as we've mentioned before, all the forensic evidence, the DNA, everything points to him, and there is no forensic evidence

whatsoever pointing to Rodney Reid and this police officer who was in a relationship. There's now more witnesses have come forward to say that he'd threatened to kill Stacy in the past that he'd lied about his whereabouts, and as we've exposed on this podcast before, he also had assistance of other police officers to help him cover up the crime,

and this again will be shown in the documentary. One of those police officers, it's believed, was going to blow the whistle on what happened, and it's alleged that he killed himself and took his own life and his family

believes that that was a result of this case. And the other officer who was investigating the matter was mysteriously killed in Texas, and the Texas authorities say that it was a Mexican drug cartel who killed him, even though at the time he was looking at other avenues of who might have killed Stacy because it was obvious Rodney

didn't do it. So you make your own mind up whether you believe the police version of events, and if you want to know more about this case, please feel free to go back through the archives of Curtain, whether it's on the Apple podcast app, on Spotify, on our website, and you'll see the episodes with Rodney Reid's name in the title, and you can excuse me, and you can hear all of those episodes and all of the information that shows the police corruption and the evidence of Rodney

Reid's innocence. Finally, in this update episode, I just want to touch on the execution that took place in the United States today of Brandon Bernard. Brandon was forty years old. He was eighteen when the crime he was involved in took place. Brandon was an African American man, again from Texas. He never denied that he was there when the crime happened,

but that he didn't commit the crime. And there's two things pointing towards his innocence, Both that he didn't carry out the murder and there was no direct evidence to show that he did, and that he also had a terrible defense attorney who failed to call expert witnesses, who failed to examine areas of appeal that were open at the time, who failed to analyze some of the evidence that was available to show that Brandon wasn't involved in

the murder itself, and didn't call the appropriate witnesses that were available and were as obvious as anything. Unfortunately, as I say, Brandon was only eighteen years old when this happened. He was a changed man by the own words of the governor of the prison he was in. He was a reformed individual and doing a lot of good work with other inmates and helping others to reform and change and turn their lives around to But what's quite different about this case is that it was a federal crime

in the United States. Now, not to complicate issues too much, but the vast, vast majority of executions that are carried out by the hundreds over the last few decades in the United States are carried out by individual states, predominantly places like Texas and Florida. Brandon's execution, being a federal crime,

was carried out by the federal government. And what makes this both appalling and interesting for people and important for people to know is that since nineteen sixty three, only a handful of Americans have been executed by the federal government. So we went the entire terms of Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton with not a single American citizen being executed by

the federal US government. Then under George W. Bush, three people were executed, and they included Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma bombing that killed one hundred and sixty eight people and injured more than six hundred and eighty others, and there was absolutely no doubt about his guilt. One of the others executed by George W. Bush was a serial killer who had taken countless lives. It's believed more

than ten. That was early on in the presidency of George W. Bush, and he didn't execute anyone in his second term. Throughout both terms of President Obama, nobody was executed, and then until recently under President Trump, nobody had been executed either. So there'd only been three executioners until this year since nineteen sixty three, and as I say, they included the real killers and the White Supreme White supremaist terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed over one hundred and sixty people.

Since then, Donald Trump has been on an executing spree this year, primarily since the polls drifted against him and since he lost the election, and he has executed eight people and plans to execute at least five more. So he is executing more individuals than George W. Bush ever did by a long margin. And as I say, no one else had ever been executed since nineteen sixty three. It won't come as any surprise that all of these prisoners are either black, Native American or poor white people.

These are all people who had very poor defenses. Now, some of them are guilty, some of them are innocent, but the fact that these cases are being rushed through should be alarming to anyone. The fact that presidents Democrat, Republican of all different stripes, and we know the records of those other presidents, they were not good guys. So you can see what sort of extreme crime you had to commit for decades and decades and decades to be

executed by the federal government in the United States. And now Donald Trump, having lost the election, is ordering the mass execution of federal prisoners. There is never in the history of the United States since the Civil War been so many scheduled federal executions and executions having already taken place. As I say, there's already been eight and there's many more planned. So this is something I would encourage everyone

to keep an eye out and share information about. This can't just happen under this media frenzy around the election and Donald Trump claiming that it was rigged. The coronavirus pandemic that's got a lot of people understandably glued to their TVs. And it's under this cover that Trump is using to execute people who are not getting the appeals and the revisions of their cases that they are due. And by no means is he executing the worst of

the worst. He has not executed a single serial killer under these planned executions, and yet he's happy to carry out executions of black men who committed crimes when they were eighteen years old, barely adults, who are reformed and testified to that fact by the governors of the prison they're held in, and they are being excuted without the

Supreme Court having any time to really look at their convictions. So, as I say, please keep an eye out for future updates on Kevin Henry's case, make sure you're supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia, make sure you're supporting the families of those who have lost loved ones to deaths in custody in Australia, and look out for the

Rodney Reeds special on ABC twenty twenty. And as I say, it's also really important to keep an eye on what is happening in the United States, because, as we've spoken about in the past, whether it's interrogation techniques, whether it's the kind of weapons that are used, whether it's the behavior of police, our police forces in Australia are heavily

influenced by the United States. In fact, much of the everything from the chokeholds they use to the interrogations techniques they use as well come directly from the US and the FBI, So this is really important stuff for everyone to know. Thank you for tuning in to this update and look out for an all new episode of Curtain the podcast coming very soon.