The Supreme Court rejected an appeal from longtime death row inmate Rodney Reed, who has been fighting to have crime scene evidence DNA tested, which he says will clear him.
Reed, who was convicted and sentenced to death over the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites, has long maintained his innocence.
For the second time in less than three years, the justices left in place a ruling against Reed from the federal appeals court in New Orleans.
The three liberal justices dissented.
Nineteen-year-old Stites was strangled to death by a belt on her way to work at a supermarket in Bastrop, a rural community about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Austin.
Prosecutors have refused to allow for DNA testing of the webbed belt and also say Reed raped Stipes, but he contends they were having a consensual affair.
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.
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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