Beyonce Knowles-Carter has added her name to a viral petition to prevent convicted murderer Rodney Reed’s execution in Texas.
The 38-year-old singer has signed the Change.org petition, urging Texas Governor Greg Abbott to take another look at the evidence, WENN.com reports.
Kim Kardashian-West, Rihanna, Meek Mill, and Busta Rhymes have already signed the petition and urged fans to do the same.
Kim’s husband, gospel musician Kanye West, 42, asked professional athletes in the NBA and NFL to stop playing for a week to help prevent Reed’s execution.
Reed, who is Black, has spent 21 years on death row for the 1996 murder and rape of 19-year-old Stacey Stites, who is white.
Stites was scheduled to work at a grocery store in Bastrop, Texas on the morning of April 23, 1996, but she never showed up.
Her body was found later that day. She had been strangled to death with her own belt.
The prosecution linked Reed’s DNA to live sperm found inside Stites’ body during her autopsy. Police had his DNA on file because he had been arrested – but not convicted – in a different rape case.
Reed confessed that he had “consensual sex” with Stites on the day before her death, but his defense attorney claimed sperm can’t survive in a deceased body for more than 24 hours.
Prosecution experts testified that sperm can survive for up to seven days. Reed was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury.
But according to CNN, a former prison inmate named Arthur Snow, Jr. has claimed in an affidavit that Stites’ fiancé, a Texas police officer, confessed to the killing.
Reed is set to be executed on November 20. His brother hopes all the celebrity attention will help stop Reed’s execution.
Rihanna tweeted fans asking them to sign the petition: “One Click!!! SIGN this petition if you don’t believe the Government should kill an innocent man!!!” she wrote.
Rapper Meek Mill, who campaigns for justice reform after his 2017 incarceration for a parole violation, tweeted: “16 days left and he will be executed for a crime he didn’t commit.”
Questlove, T. I., Gigi Hadid, and LL Cool J have also used social media to highlight Reed’s case.
