The U.S. Supreme Court rejected death row inmate Rodney Reed's appeal Monday, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote separately to urge Texas courts to conduct a "full and fair" examination of evidence that raises questions about his guilt.
"In my view, there is no escaping the pall of uncertainty over Reed's conviction. Nor is there any denying the irreversible consequence of setting that uncertainty aside," Sotomayor wrote in a statement accompanying Monday's ruling.
"Reed has 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," Sotomayor added.
"Misgivings this ponderous should not be brushed aside," she wrote.
Following common practice, the court did not disclose why Reed's appeal was rejected, and none of the other eight justices addressed his case Monday.
Reed's appeal had been filed at the high court before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued a stay of execution in November to allow time to examine claims that Reed was innocent in the strangulation murder of Stacey Stites, whose body was discovered along a rural road outside Bastrop in 1996.
The claims before the Supreme Court included:
_Sworn statements from new witnesses who said Reed and Stites were having a secret affair, explaining the presence of Reed's semen in her body.
_Forensic experts who concluded that the state of Stites' body made it "medically and scientifically impossible" for the murder to have been committed at 3 a.m., when prosecutors argued that Reed raped and murdered the 19-year-old. Stites likely died hours earlier, when she would have been with her fiance, Jimmy Fennell, in their Giddings apartment, the experts said.
_A medical examiner who recanted courtroom testimony that the condition of sperm in Stites' body meant she had been killed around 3 a.m.
_Evidence that called into question the trial testimony from two other prosecution witnesses that put the time of Stites' death at 3 a.m. based on the condition of Reed's sperm.
That new evidence had already been considered, and rejected, by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, leading to the Reed appeal that the Supreme Court rejected Monday.
In the meantime, however, Reed's lawyers filed another appeal with the Texas court _ their 10th _ raising additional arguments for innocence that led to November's stay of execution and an order for a Bastrop trial court to examine the new evidence.
The 10th appeal included a sworn statement from Arthur Snow Jr., a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang who said Fennell confessed to murdering Stites because she "had been sleeping around with a black man behind his back." When the alleged conversation took place, Fennell was serving 10 years in prison for sexually assaulting a woman in his custody as a Georgetown police officer.
The 10th appeal also included statements from others who said Fennell was aware that Stites was having an affair with a black man and that the couple had a tumultuous relationship.
In her statement on the case, Sotomayor encouraged the courts in Texas to consider all evidence presented by Reed, not just what was included in the 10th appeal.
"The Texas courts will now consider on the merits _ for the first time in Reed's decades-long effort to prove his innocence _ whether Reed is indeed innocent of murdering Stacey Lee Stites," wrote Sotomayor, a member of the court's liberal wing who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009.
"I remain hopeful that available state processes will take care to ensure full and fair consideration of Reed's innocence _ and will not allow the most permanent of consequences to weigh on the Nation's conscience while Reed's conviction remains so mired in doubt," Sotomayor wrote.
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