Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that she found it puzzling that state prosecutors and lower state and federal courts would refuse to test genetic material on a murder weapon at the request of death row prisoner Rodney Reed.
At the core of the case is a Texas law on post-conviction DNA testing that bars tests of evidence that cannot be proven to be uncontaminated. Prosecutors and lower courts used the law to reject Reed's request, even though DNA testing has advanced significantly since his 1998 conviction, and he had evidence that suggested someone else had killed Stacey Lee Stites.
"It is inexplicable why the Bastrop County District Attorney's Office refuses to allow DNA testing of the belt that was used to kill Stites, despite the very substantial possibility that such testing could exculpate Reed and identify the real killer," Justice Sotomayor wrote. "It is also inexplicable why the courts below did not proceed with more caution and carefully consider each of Reed's arguments, especially given that his claim implicates the 'constitutionally intolerable' possibility of the 'execution of a[n] ... innocent person.'"
The majority did not release a written opinion for denying the petition.
Reed was convicted in 1998 of murdering Stites, a woman who was having an affair with him while she was engaged to Bastrop County police officer Jimmy Fennell, the opinion says. Reed has since provided evidence that Fennell murdered Stites after learning about the affair, the opinion says.
"For instance, Reed has provided sworn affidavits attesting that Fennell told a colleague one month before the murder that Stites was 'f***ing a n***r' and that Fennell, while imprisoned ... for an unrelated sexual assault conviction, had confessed to a fellow inmate that he 'had to kill [his] n***r-loving fiancé[e],'" the opinion says.
Reed is a Black man and Stites was a white woman.
Stites' killer strangled her to death with Stites' webbed belt. Since his conviction, Reed has sought to have the belt tested for Fennell's DNA.
Reed asked the Bastrop County District Attorney's Office to allow DNA testing on the belt and some other items, with his counsel offering to foot the bill. The county prosecutors refused.
Reed filed a motion in state court seeking an order under Article 64, the state statute governing post-conviction DNA testing. But the court denied the motion, as the law required the court to find "a chain of custody sufficient to establish that [the evidence] has not been substituted, tampered with, replaced or altered in any material respect," according to Justice Sotomayor's dissenting opinion.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, affirmed the denial, finding that the belt had been contaminated because it had been handled by attorneys, court staff and possibly jurors.
Reed filed a federal constitutional challenge to Texas' use of Article 64, arguing the law's noncontamination clause violated his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. He contended that testing could have provided useful results even with contamination, and that refusing to allow a test that could prove his innocence was fundamentally unfair.
The district court tossed his suit and the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal, saying it was time-barred. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit, ruling that the statute of limitations began to run at the end of the state court litigation.
The Fifth Circuit ordered additional briefing on Reed's due process claim before ruling that Article 64's noncontamination clause did not violate his due process rights.
In Monday's dissent, Justice Sotomayor said the Fifth Circuit never directly explored the argument that the noncontamination requirement no longer serves any legitimate purpose because DNA testing can now deliver accurate results even when evidence has been contaminated.
If that contention is correct, she wrote, then the noncontamination requirement may violate due process principles by arbitrarily denying Reed the opportunity to prove his innocence with new evidence.
"The court should vacate the Fifth Circuit's judgment and remand the case for the Fifth Circuit to address Reed's argument in the first instance," she wrote. "Because the court refuses to do so, the state will likely execute Reed without the world ever knowing whether Reed's or Fennell's DNA is on the murder weapon, even though a simple DNA test could reveal that information. I respectfully dissent."
Attorneys for Reed said in a prepared statement that the fight to save their client's life was not over.
Jane Pucher, staff attorney at the Innocence Project, said it is now up to the state of Texas to prevent "an irreparable injustice" in Reed's case, adding that "it is inexplicable why Texas would not want to test the murder weapon and confirm the truth."
Parker Rider-Longmaid called on local prosecutors and the state attorney general to allow DNA testing in the case — especially seeing that Article 64 does not constrain prosecutors from testing contaminated evidence.
"It is impossible to understand why Texas prosecutors continue to threaten Rodney Reed with the irreversible punishment of death for a crime that one cannot believe beyond a reasonable doubt he committed," Rider-Longmaid said.
The Texas Office of the Attorney General did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
Reed is represented by Parker Rider-Longmaid of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP and Jane Pucher of the Innocence Project.
The government is represented by Lanora Pettit and Judd Stone of the Texas Office of the Attorney General.
The case is Rodney Reed v. Bryan Goertz, case number 24-1268, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
--Editing by Janice Carter Brown.
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