With lives at stake, Texas owes Tinslee Lewis and Rodney Reed more time
At first glance, there is nothing strikingly similar about the cases of Tinslee Lewis and Rodney Reed.
Lewis is a tiny infant, born with a congenital heart defect among a litany of other devastating health problems. She has spent every moment of her achingly short life hooked up to life-sustaining equipment in the intensive care unit at Cooks Children’s Medical Center.
Reed is an inmate on Texas’ death row, convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites. His execution is scheduled for later this month.
While it’s hard to imagine that these individuals have anything in common, they find themselves in corresponding circumstances: Their lives are in the hands of the state, and both are fighting the clock.
Earlier this week, Tinslee was scheduled to have been removed from the ventilator that has been helping her to breathe since July.
The decision was made not by her family, but by a bioethics committee at Cooks which has determined that the tiny girl is in pain and that her condition will not change; that it is incurable; that it is fatal.
That isn’t unusual. It’s the job of hospitals to make such determinations.
But in Texas, those decisions are shielded by the state.
That is because of a law commonly referred to as the “10-day Rule” (a part of the Texas Advanced Directives Act) which allows a hospital bioethics committee, after determining that a patient’s case is futile, to give a family 10 days’ notice before discontinuing life-extending treatment.
The committee’s decision is binding, and there are no appeals.
That gives patients and families in crisis — who are often vulnerable and without resources — a shockingly brief amount of time to seek alternative treatment.
This year, the Legislature considered a bill that would have extended the time of notice, but it didn’t pass. So it isn’t any surprise that Lewis’ mother, Trinity, has turned to the courts.
Just hours before her daughter’s care was to have ended, Tarrant County Judge Alex Kim ordered the hospital to continue treatment until at least Nov. 22, giving Lewis and her family much-needed time to search for another facility to continue her daughter’s care.
While she is unlikely to find such care, at the very least, Lewis can used that time to come to terms with her daughter’s tragic condition and its inevitable outcome.
Meanwhile, several hundred miles south, Rodney Reed is also fighting the state and the clock.
Reed has been on death row since 1998, convicted of a brutal crime.
He has maintained his innocence for more than 20 year, but his appeals have been exhausted.
While his conviction hinged on evidence collected through the leading forensic science of the time, advances in forensic science as well as some potentially new information from witnesses have raised questions about his guilt.
It’s probably not enough to exonerate him, but it is enough to throw his conviction into doubt. And in the case of a man on death row, it should be enough to save his life.
More than 2 million people have signed a petition urging Gov. Greg Abbott to spare Reed.
And a coalition of celebrities, lawmakers and religious leaders joined forces to do the same — at least until the case can be more thoroughly reviewed.
Even if Reed did not commit the crime that earned him a spot on death row, there is evidence to suggest he isn’t a person who should be roaming free. Reed has been linked to the brutal sexual assaults of multiple women, including a 12-year-old girl.
But that doesn’t absolve the state of responsibility to pursue additional leads in Stites’ murder, especially given the punishment it carries.
In both cases, the state has a responsibility to protect life whenever possible and to take it only when absolutely necessary.
And in both, the state has the ability to uphold justice and to show mercy by giving Tinslee and Reed, the undeniably innocent and the questionably guilty, more time.
