The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed's latest bid for DNA testing of evidence from the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites, a decision that clears the path toward his execution after nearly three decades of legal wrangling.
The justices said they would not hear Reed's challenge to the state's post-conviction DNA testing statute. The challenge centered on a facet of the law concerning potentially contaminated evidence and DNA results. Reed's attorneys had pressed the Court to intervene, arguing in their petition:
"Once again, Reed must call on this Court to intervene when no other court will give him justice."
The Court disagreed. And with that, the legal road narrows considerably for a man who has maintained his innocence since his conviction for the murder of the white 19-year-old in Bastrop County, Texas.
Reed was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites. He has long sought genetic testing of items collected from the crime scene, including what his attorneys describe as "the murder weapon, a webbed belt used to strangle Stites." They contend Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz refuses to test it.
According to The Hill, Reed has maintained that Stites's fiancé, ex-police officer Jimmy Fennell, raped and strangled her after learning she was having an affair with Reed. Fennell spent time in prison for a different sexual assault. He has denied killing Stites.
Reed's attorneys argued that DNA testing could settle the question:
"It is likely that the killer's DNA is on the belt, and a DNA test could reveal the truth."
That claim has been circulating through the courts for years. The question is whether the legal system owes Reed yet another bite at this apple.
This is not the first time Reed has brought his case before the nation's highest court. The Court denied a 2020 petition from Reed. In 2022, he asked the justices to reverse lower court decisions finding he had waited too long to file his lawsuit seeking DNA testing. The justices greenlit his efforts in a 6-3 decision the following year, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.
So the Supreme Court already gave Reed a chance to move forward. Nearly three years later, it has declined to extend that lifeline again.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton pushed back on the framing of Reed's challenge, arguing the Supreme Court has long affirmed that state legislatures are best suited to establish the process by which inmates may access post-conviction DNA testing. On the contamination question specifically, Paxton wrote:
"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."
That distinction matters. Post-conviction DNA testing statutes exist for a reason: they impose procedural guardrails so that decades-old evidence isn't retested under conditions that make results unreliable. The chain of custody isn't a technicality. It is the architecture that keeps forensic evidence meaningful.
The Court's refusal to hear Reed's case stands in notable contrast to its handling of another Texas death row inmate's challenge. Earlier this year, the justices weighed Ruben Gutierrez's bid to challenge the same post-conviction DNA testing statute. The Court ultimately sided 6-3 with Gutierrez in June, ruling that his legal bid to test evidence he claims would block his execution may proceed.
Two Texas inmates. The same statute. Different outcomes. Whatever factual or procedural distinctions the Court drew between the cases, the result is unmistakable: Reed's challenge is over at the federal level.
Reed's case has attracted significant attention over the years, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in 2020 that Reed had:
"...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."
Note the qualifier: "if true." Doubt is not exoneration. Allegations about an alternative suspect do not erase a conviction. And the legal system, whatever its imperfections, cannot function if every death row inmate is granted infinite procedural do-overs based on claims that remain, after decades, unverified.
Conservatives have long understood that justice requires finality. The appellate process exists to catch errors, and Reed has availed himself of it repeatedly. The Supreme Court itself gave him a second chance after 2022. The system worked as designed. It simply did not produce the outcome Reed's advocates wanted.
If the DNA evidence was as exculpatory as Reed's lawyers insist, the procedural path to test it was open for years. The question the courts ultimately answered was not whether Reed is innocent. It was whether the legal process owed him yet another opportunity to prove it. The answer, as of Monday, is no.
The road to execution is now open. And the legal system, for all the criticism it will absorb, did not rush to get here. It took nearly thirty years.
