Supreme Court rejects Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed’s appeal of DNA testing

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by Rodney Reed, a longtime Texas death row inmate who sought to test crime scene evidence that he says will help exonerate him.

The justices stayed a ruling against Reed from the federal appeals court in New Orleans for the second time in less than three years.

The three liberal justices dissented.

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Reed was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of 19-year-old Stacy Stites. Prosecutors refused to allow DNA testing of the webbed belt that was used to strangle Stites while she was on her way to work at a supermarket in Bastrop, a rural community about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Austin.

Prosecutors say Reed also raped Stites, but maintains he had a consensual affair with her.

Reed has long maintained that Stets’ fiancé, former police officer Jimmy Fennell, was the real killer. Reed says Fennell was angry about the interracial issue. Stites was white and Reid was black. Fennell, who served time for sexual assault and was released from prison in 2018, denied killing Stets.

“The killer held this belt tightly to her throat for minutes, and must have left his sweat and skin cells — and thus his DNA — where he held the belt, both on the surface and deep within the belt,” Reade’s lawyers wrote.

State and lower federal courts have so far upheld prosecutors’ refusal to allow the testing, which Reed’s defense team will pay for.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that it was “inexplicable” why prosecutors did not allow the belt test, “despite the extremely high probability that such a test would exonerate Reed and identify the true killer.”

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With the Supreme Court declining to intervene, “the state would likely execute Reed without the world knowing whether Reed or Fennell’s DNA was on the murder weapon,” Sotomayor wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The state’s Supreme Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Texas law on DNA testing does not apply to items that may be contaminated. But the state routinely uses tainted evidence in trials, Reed’s lawyers wrote, and in any case, the state, not Reed, was responsible for handling the evidence.

In 2023, the justices ruled by a 6-3 vote to return Reed’s case to a lower court for constitutionally challenging the state’s law on DNA testing.

The issue before the Supreme Court then was whether Reed, who was sentenced to death more than 25 years ago, had waited too long before filing a lawsuit claiming that untested crime scene evidence would exonerate him. Texas courts and a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that he missed the deadline.

Reed’s efforts to stop his execution have received support from celebrities such as Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey.