WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from longtime Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed who has sought to test crime-scene evidence that he says will help clear him.
The justices left in place 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.
Reed was sentenced to death for the 1996 killing of 19-year-old Stacey Stites. Prosecutors have refused to allow for DNA testing of the webbed belt that was used to strangle Stites as she made 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 he contends that he was having a consensual affair with her.
Reed has long maintained that Stites’ fiance, former police officer Jimmy Fennell, was the real killer. Fennell was angry about the interracial affair, Reed says. Stites was white and Reed is Black. Fennell, who served time for sexual assault and was released from prison in 2018, has denied killing Stites.
“The killer held that belt tight against her throat for minutes, and must have left his sweat and skin cells—and thus his DNA—where he gripped the belt, both on the surface and deep within the webbing,” Reed's attorneys wrote.
State and lower federal courts have so far backed prosecutors' refusal to allow for the testing, which would be paid for by Reed's defense team.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that it is “inexplicable” why prosecutors wouldn't allow the belt to be tested, “despite the very substantial possibility that such testing would exculpate Reed and identify the real killer.”
With the high court's refusal to step in, “the State will likely execute Reed without the world ever knowing whether Reed's or Fennell's DNA is on the murder weapon,” Sotomayor wrote in an opinion that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The state's top criminal appeals court ruled that the Texas law on DNA testing doesn't apply to items that may have been contaminated. But the state routinely uses contaminated evidence in prosecutions, Reed's lawyers wrote, and in any event, the state, not Reed, was responsible for the handling of the evidence.
In 2023, the justices ruled 6-3 to send Reed’s case back to a lower court for his constitutional challenge to the state’s law on DNA testing.
The issue before the high court then was whether Reed, sentenced to death more than 25 years ago, waited too long to file his lawsuit claiming that untested crime-scene evidence would exonerate him. Texas courts and the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that he missed the deadline.
Reed's efforts to stop his execution have received support from such celebrities as Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey.
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