Law360 (May 15, 2026, 7:01 PM EDT) -- Even before he was sentenced to death at age 19 for killing members of his ex-girlfriend's family, Roderick LeShun Rankin was intimately familiar with murder and violence. Four years earlier, his sister Paula had been killed. The murder was never solved, but Rankin's older brother, Rodney Rankin, was suspected in her death.

Roderick Rankin was convicted of murdering Ernestine Halford, Nathaniel Halford and Zena Reynolds — the mother, stepfather and sister of his ex-girlfriend, Sonyae Reynolds — during a 1994 home intrusion in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Prosecutors said Rankin carried out the killings after repeatedly threatening to murder Sonyae Reynolds and her family if she left him. At trial, jurors heard evidence that Rankin confessed to the shootings after hours of police interrogation, that Sonyae Reynolds later identified clothing worn by the intruder as his, and that investigators recovered shoes, clothing and other physical evidence they said linked Rankin to both the crime scene and the murder weapon.

Since receiving his death sentence, however, Rankin has spent decades building a case for innocence, claiming that his brother Rodney is the one who committed the killings. He said Rodney had confessed as much to him shortly after the crime and later privately admitted the murders to a pastor. Rankin has argued that his trial lawyer failed to investigate Rodney as an alternative suspect and that Rodney manipulated his intellectually disabled younger brother into "taking the fall" for the triple homicide.

His lawyers also contend that Rankin's low IQ and heightened vulnerability to coercion contributed to a false confession and that physical evidence pointed more closely to Rodney. As part of Rankin's habeas corpus litigation, they argue that courts improperly refused to consider key evidence supporting both his innocence and his claim that he is constitutionally ineligible for execution under the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Atkins v. Virginia.

On May 4, more than 30 years after a court sentenced Rankin to die, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up his case, leaving unresolved a long-running split among federal appeals courts over what qualifies as "new evidence" under Schlup v. Delo, a ruling that allows prisoners asserting actual innocence to overcome certain procedural defaults in habeas proceedings.

The case has drawn attention from death penalty lawyers and legal scholars because it sits at the intersection of actual innocence claims, false confessions, intellectual disability and the steep procedural barriers governing federal habeas corpus review.

The case also raises broader questions about how courts evaluate intellectual disability claims under Atkins, which barred the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, including how judges should weigh conflicting IQ scores and evidence of impaired adaptive functioning.

Rankin's lawyers had urged the justices to consider the case alongside Hamm v. Smith, a dispute that the court is expected to decide this term involving how judges should assess multiple IQ scores in death penalty litigation.

"Fundamentally, this is a case about innocence, and then the question is, what will the courts do about it?" said Joseph Luby, an assistant federal defender in Philadelphia who represents Rankin. "He was very easy to set up. He was not a good witness at trial, and it was easy for the police to bully him into a confession."

Luby said there is a "distinct possibility" that Arkansas could execute an innocent man.

How Roderick Rankin's Habeas Case Took Off

In the middle of the night on Dec. 27, 1994, Sonyae Reynolds hid in her bedroom closet after hearing the sound of a break-in at her family's apartment. Gunshots and the screams of her relatives followed.

When she came out minutes later, she found the bodies of her mother, her stepfather and her sister, all fatally shot in the head. Zena Reynolds' two young children, who had been inside the apartment during the attack, survived unharmed.

Prosecutors alleged that Rankin carried out the killings after months of threats and escalating violence tied to his turbulent relationship with Sonyae Reynolds, whom he had dated on and off. According to a reply brief the state of Arkansas submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court, Reynolds testified that Rankin had repeatedly threatened to kill her and her family if she left him.

Hours after the shootings, police interrogated Rankin. After initially denying involvement, Rankin eventually gave a short recorded confession following lengthy, unrecorded questioning.

Before trial, Rankin's attorney raised intellectual disability as a mitigating factor under an Arkansas statute that predated Atkins. Rankin had received IQ scores of 66 from a defense expert and 72 from the state's expert.

The traditional benchmark courts have often used in death penalty intellectual disability litigation is an IQ score of roughly 70, though modern Supreme Court doctrine has made clear that the analysis must involve more than a simple numerical cutoff.

The state court ultimately concluded Rankin was not intellectually disabled under Arkansas law. At trial, Rankin's counsel argued that he was pressured into making a false confession, and that there was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime scene. A jury found Rankin guilty and he was sentenced in February 1996.

Rankin's conviction and sentence were upheld by Arkansas appellate courts, but his case took a turn in 2006, after the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas appointed federal defenders to represent him in his habeas corpus challenge.

In an extensive investigation of the case, Rankin's habeas lawyers collected evidence that cast doubt on his guilt.

They found evidence that Sonyae Reynolds initially told a 911 dispatcher and investigators that she could not identify the intruder and described the attacker as shorter and stockier than Rankin, a description they say more closely matched Rodney. They also pointed to evidence that a bloody shoe print and bloodstained clothing recovered after the killings did not match Rankin's size or build.

Luby said Rodney confessed the killings to Rankin a few days after the crime. Rodney also later confessed the murders to his pastor, according to Rankin's habeas filings, describing details that would have been known only to the perpetrator.

Pastor Augustine Bailey said she did not disclose Rodney's alleged confessions until after both Rodney and the brothers' mother, Elaine Rankin, had died. Rodney died in 2006, Elaine died in 2009, and Bailey disclosed the alleged confession to Rankin's habeas counsel later that same year, according to the certiorari petition.

Rankin's habeas attorneys argued Rodney also had a motive: Zena Reynolds had recently left him, moved with their two children into her mother's home and filed child-support and custody papers shortly before the killings.

In federal court, Rankin advanced several major claims. He argued his trial counsel provided him with constitutionally deficient assistance by failing to investigate Rodney as an alternative suspect.

As part of his innocence claim, Rankin argued that Supreme Court precedent allowed him to overcome procedural barriers in habeas law in light of the new evidence. Finally, he argued that he is constitutionally ineligible for execution under Atkins.

Inside Rankin's Habeas Fight

In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Schlup v. Delo that prisoners asserting credible claims of actual innocence may overcome certain procedural barriers in federal habeas corpus proceedings if they can show that, in light of new evidence, "it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have convicted" them.

In an Oct. 27, 2009, deposition with federal defenders, Bailey described having a privileged conversation with Rodney where he admitted to killing Reynolds and her parents and even showed the blood on his shoes.

"Shun didn't do it," she recalled Rodney saying, referring to his brother by a nickname. "I did it."

Bailey said Rodney had talked with his brother and told him that he needed to take the responsibility of the killings because he couldn't take care of his mother. She also talked about a "feud" between Rodney and Zena Reynolds and said "he was very upset that she had taken the boys from him."

"When you were listening to Rodney tell his story about how he killed the Reynolds, was he animated?" Assistant Federal Defender James Moreno asked.

"He was very animated," Bailey replied. "He was showing me exactly how he did what he did."

The Eastern District of Arkansas acknowledged the pastor's testimony warranted serious consideration, but in February 2023, U.S. District Judge James M. Moody Jr. denied habeas relief after evidentiary proceedings, concluding that Rankin's innocence evidence was not strong enough to overcome the procedural barriers in federal habeas review.

Judge Moody said in his opinion that Rankin's habeas claims were procedurally barred and that the evidence gathered by the federal defenders was insufficiently persuasive compared to the trial evidence.

The court also largely deferred to the earlier Arkansas state-court findings that Rankin was not intellectually disabled and therefore eligible for the death penalty, citing the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, or AEDPA, the federal law sharply limiting habeas corpus.

On June 20, 2025, an Eighth Circuit panel affirmed the denial of habeas relief, rejecting Rankin's claims on the merits.

The panel first found that Rankin failed to meet the standard set by Schlup, applying its own narrow view of that ruling that holds that evidence is not "new" if the factual basis for it could have been discovered earlier through "due diligence."

The court reasoned that the central premise of Rankin's innocence theory — that Rodney committed the murders — was already known before trial because Rankin had told his trial counsel that Rodney confessed to him, but no effort was made to corroborate that claim.

"It is true that Bailey's deposition was not available until well after Rankin's trial. Nevertheless, the factual basis for it — that Rodney committed the murders — existed prior to trial," U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond W. Gruender wrote for the panel. "We conclude that Rankin has not made a threshold showing of actual innocence because the evidence he points to is not 'new.'"

On the Atkins issue, the panel relied on the Arkansas court's earlier finding that Rankin had not established intellectual disability despite an IQ score of 66. The court also referenced testimony from a state mental-health expert and Rankin's former junior-high math teacher indicating that his adaptive functioning appeared "acceptable" and that he did not perform at a special-needs level in school.

"It was not unreasonable for the state court to conclude that Rankin was not intellectually disabled," the panel said.

The Schlup Split and the Stakes Beyond Rankin

Under habeas doctrine, federal courts are presumptively forbidden from addressing the merits of federal constitutional claims that a criminal defendant failed to raise in state court, or failed to raise according to state rules.

Some exceptions to that presumption exist. The Schlup decision provides one of them. The decision recognized an "actual innocence gateway" so that when prisoners offer sufficient new evidence that they are innocent of a crime, a court will overlook the procedural default and review the merits of their claims.

By declining to review Rankin's case, the U.S. Supreme Court leaves open a circuit court split as to what constitutes "new" under the ruling.

The Eighth, Third and Fifth circuits require "newly discovered" evidence, meaning that evidence is not "new" if it could have been discovered through earlier investigation.

On the other hand, the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh circuits embrace a broader "newly presented" rule, according to which evidence can qualify as "new" so long as the jury never heard it, as was the case with Rankin's trial.

Luby told Law360 that the "minority" view effectively stops prisoners' innocence claims in their tracks in situations where they have been represented by lawyers who failed to properly investigate possible exculpatory theories.

"That's the problem here," he said. "That standard would essentially eliminate any claim where the underlying failure to prove the prisoner's innocence is because counsel was ineffective."

The certiorari denial also leaves intact Arkansas courts' determination that Rankin remains eligible for execution despite IQ testing and other evidence suggesting possible intellectual disability.

In 2002, in Atkins, the Supreme Court held that a person who has an intellectual disability is ineligible for the death penalty. The rationale is that an intellectually disabled person is not as culpable or deterrable as the "worst of the worst" the Constitution allows to be executed under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments." In another landmark case three years later, Roper v. Simmons, the court also held that people who were under 18 at the time of their crime cannot be sentenced to the death penalty.

"We're only willing to execute the worst of the worst, the most evil, the most culpable, the most blameworthy, and a person with intellectual disability can never be in that category," Christopher Slobogin, a scholar at Vanderbilt Law School, told Law360.

Cases like Rankin's raise difficult questions about how courts should determine whether a person is cognitively impaired, particularly when IQ scores fluctuate over time or fall near the rough threshold courts have historically associated with intellectual disability.

At trial, Rankin received an IQ score of 66 from a defense expert and 72 from a state expert. Arkansas courts ultimately concluded that he was not intellectually disabled and therefore remained eligible for execution.

But Slobogin said modern Supreme Court precedent has increasingly moved away from rigid numerical cutoffs. In its 2014 seminal ruling in Hall v. Florida, the court held that, to comply with the Eighth Amendment, the states must consider intellectual functioning, adaptive deficits, and the standard error of measurement.

In setting that new framework, Slobogin said, the high court has done something that it rarely does: defer to groups like the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association in determining the standards to use to evaluate a defendant's intellectual abilities.

But the 5-4 ruling in Hall was a close call, Slobogin noted. In a dissenting opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito warned that the court was turning evolving clinical standards from professional organizations into constitutional law, and warned that the shift would produce "serious practical problems" that it was best for states to resolve.

"Under our modern Eighth Amendment cases, what counts are our society's standards — which is to say, the standards of the American people — not the standards of professional associations, which at best represent the views of a small professional elite," Justice Alito wrote.

By taking up Hamm v. Smith, the Supreme Court is stepping into a territory that is difficult to navigate, Slobogin said. The case involves Joseph Clifton Smith, an Alabama death-row prisoner convicted of a 1997 robbery-murder who argues he is intellectually disabled and therefore constitutionally ineligible for execution under Atkins.

Over the years, Smith received five IQ scores ranging from 72 to 78 — all slightly above the rough 70-point benchmark. But lower courts found that, once the standard error of measurement and evidence of adaptive-functioning deficits were considered, Smith qualified as intellectually disabled.

Slobogin said IQ scores can vary because of ordinary differences in test performance, the "practice effect" created by repeated exposure to similar tests, malingering by defendants intentionally underperforming, and the "Flynn effect," the theory that population-wide IQ scores gradually rise over time if testing instruments are not periodically recalibrated.

"There are lots of reasons why you could get different test scores," he said. "I don't know what the court's going to say."

On Thursday night, hours after the Supreme Court lifted a temporary stay of execution issued by the Fifth Circuit, the state of Texas executed Edward Busby, a man convicted of kidnapping and killing Laura Lee Crane, a 77-year-old retired professor, in 2005 in Tarrant County. 

Busby's attorneys had raised intellectual disability claims under Atkins and asked the court to pause the execution until it ruled in Hamm v. Smith. The three liberal-leaning justices dissented to the court's grant of Texas' emergency petition to move forward with the death sentence. According to advocates, it was Texas' 600th execution since 1982.

"In capital cases, we rarely intervene to preserve life," Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote in a short dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. "I cannot understand the court's rush to extinguish it, much less in the circumstances of this case."

Now that the court has turned down Rankin's certiorari petition, it's unclear how a ruling in Smith's favor could help Rankin get off death row. Luby said Arkansas is continuing to push to exhaust his client's remaining avenues for postconviction relief.

"This is really a claim that screams out for being taken seriously," he said. "This really is a case that involves what the Supreme Court itself has said would be a fundamental miscarriage of justice, which is to execute somebody who didn't commit a crime in the first place."

--Additional reporting by Brandon Lowrey. Editing by Alex Hubbard.

Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.

For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.