The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from longtime Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed.
The justices upheld a ruling against Reed from the federal appeals court in New Orleans, marking the second time in less than three years they have done so.
Reed received a death sentence for the 1996 killing of 19-year-old Stacey Stites. Prosecutors have blocked DNA testing on the webbed belt used to strangle Stites as she headed to her supermarket job in Bastrop, a rural community 30 miles southeast of Austin.
Prosecutors maintain Reed raped Stites. Reed insists he had a consensual affair with her.
Reed has accused Stites’ fiancé, former police officer Jimmy Fennell, of the killing. Reed claims Fennell grew angry over their interracial relationship. Stites was white, and Reed is Black. Fennell served prison time for sexual assault before his 2018 release and has denied involvement in Stites’ death, according to court filings.
“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, CBS News Texas reported.
State and lower federal courts have supported prosecutors’ refusal to permit testing that Reed’s defense team would fund.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called it “inexplicable” why prosecutors would not test the belt, “despite the very substantial possibility that such testing would exculpate Reed and identify the real killer.”
Sotomayor added, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that with the high court’s action, “the State will likely execute Reed without the world ever knowing whether Reed’s or Fennell’s DNA is on the murder weapon.”
The state’s top criminal appeals court held that the Texas DNA testing law does not cover potentially contaminated items. Reed’s lawyers countered that the state routinely relies on contaminated evidence in prosecutions and that state handling caused any issues with the belt.
In 2023, the justices voted 6-3 to return Reed’s case to a lower court over his constitutional challenge to the DNA testing law. That dispute centered on whether Reed, sentenced more than 25 years ago, filed too late. Texas courts and the New Orleans federal appeals court found he had missed the deadline.
Reed’s bid to halt his execution drew backing from Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, and Oprah Winfrey.
