Supreme Court won’t hear Texas death row inmate’s bid for DNA testing again 

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed’s fight for DNA testing nearly three years after allowing his bid to prove his innocence to move forward, a move that paves the way for his execution.  

Reed was convicted and sentenced to death over the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop County, Texas but has maintained his innocence, long seeking the genetic testing of items collected from the crime scene. 

He has maintained that Stites’s fiancé, ex-police officer Jimmy Fennell, raped and strangled her after learning that the white 19-year-old was having an affair with Reed, who is Black. Fennell spent time in prison for a different sexual assault but has denied killing Stites.  

The death row inmate’s lawyers argued that Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz “refuses” to test the murder weapon, a webbed belt used to strangle Stites, despite “compelling evidence” of his innocence. 

“Once again, Reed must call on this Court to intervene when no other court will give him justice,” his lawyers wrote in his petition to the court. 

But the justices said they would not........

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