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 hear Reed’s challenge to the state’s post-conviction DNA testing statute, which centered on a facet of the law purporting potentially “contaminated” evidence cannot yield DNA results establishing proof — a requirement Reed claimed is “arbitrary” and violates his due process rights.   

“It is likely that the killer’s DNA is on the belt,” Reed’s attorneys wrote, “and a DNA test could reveal the truth.” 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said that the Supreme Court has long affirmed state legislatures as best suited to establish the process by which inmates may access post-conviction DNA testing. 

The state also argued that Reed’s position ignored the difference between biological material and where it may be found, calling it an “ignorance” that led to Reed’s suggestions that more was at play than the post-conviction testing statute’s chain-of-custody requirement.  

“Whatever he wants to call it — contamination, tampering, or comingling — it all bears on the chain of custody for DNA evidence even if it might not be particularly relevant for traditional physical evidence,” Paxton wrote in response to Reed’s petition. 

Reed’s fight was taken up by the justices at an earlier stage, in 2022, when he asked the high court to reverse lower court decisions finding he waited too long to file his lawsuit seeking the DNA testing.  

The justices greenlight his efforts in a 6-3 decision the following year, over the dissents of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. 

Before that, the court denied a 2020 petition from Reed. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote at the time that parts of Reed’s case remained uncertain, and yet, it “presented a substantial body of evidence that, if true, casts doubt on the veracity and scientific validity of the evidence on which Reed’s conviction rests.”  

Another Texas death row inmate’s bid to challenge the state’s post-conviction DNA statute was weighed by the justices earlier this year. The court ultimately sided 6-3 with the inmate, Ruben Gutierrez, ruling in June that his legal bid to test evidence he claims would block his execution may proceed. 

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