On April 23, 1996, the partially clothed body of 19-year-old Stacey Lee Stites was found along a rural road in Bastrop County, Texas. She was wearing only a black bra, underwear, torn blue jeans, socks and one tennis shoe. Investigators recovered semen from her vagina and rectum, and a medical examiner later concluded Stites had been sexually assaulted.

Near the body, police recovered part of a brown woven belt missing its buckle. Another piece of the belt, with the buckle attached, was found inside the pickup truck Stites shared with her fiancée, Jimmy Fennell, a Giddings, Texas, police officer.

Investigators concluded the belt had been used to strangle Stites. The two pieces fit together and the belt's pattern matched marks on her neck.

DNA testing later identified Rodney Reed, a Black man from the Bastrop area, as the source of the semen recovered from Stites' body. Reed was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1998.

Reed has always maintained his innocence, arguing that he and Stites, who was white, were having an affair and had consensual sex shortly before she was killed. His lawyers later uncovered evidence they say points to Fennell, who's white, as the killer, including racist statements. In one, made while serving a prison sentence for an unrelated sexual assault, Fennell allegedly said he "'had to kill [his] n***rloving fiancé[e],'" as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a later opinion.

But for nearly three decades, the centerpiece of Reed's innocence claim has been the belt investigators said was the murder weapon. Since 1999, Reed has sought to get the belt tested for DNA, but Texas courts have repeatedly denied his requests.

The case illustrates the central paradox of DNA testing: While advances in forensic science have made it easier than ever to answer questions of guilt and innocence, prisoners often face formidable legal hurdles before they can obtain testing in the first place.

Reed's case isn't unique and the problem extends far beyond Texas. All 50 states and the federal government have legal mechanisms allowing prisoners to seek postconviction DNA testing, but many statutes require inmates to satisfy burdensome procedural requirements before courts will authorize testing.

Legal scholars and innocence attorneys say those barriers have prevented postconviction DNA testing laws from delivering on their promise of making modern forensic testing available to prisoners with credible innocence claims.

Brandon L. Garrett, a leading criminal justice scholar at Duke University School of Law, told Law360 in an email that DNA testing "has certainly taught us that our ideas about finality and strength of evidence are quite fallible and limited."

"Given the lessons from those wrongful convictions, and all of the scientific research on how evidence can go wrong, we would expect that we would have clear pathways to investigate new evidence of innocence," Garrett said. "We've made some progress. And we still don't have adequate safeguards in place. Further, we have been backsliding."

The Promise of DNA

Before DNA technology entered the picture, the dominant view — reflected in literature, Supreme Court opinions and media accounts — was that, although fallible, the criminal justice system only rarely produced a wrongful conviction.

So when DNA technology began being used to test crime scene samples and link them to suspects in the mid-1980s, it was a game changer. As testing began producing exonerations, starting with the clearing of David Vasquez for a rape and murder in 1989, assumptions about the accuracy of the criminal justice system began to shatter.

Keith A. Findley, who co-founded the Wisconsin Innocence Project in 1998 and recently retired from teaching at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told Law360 that the pre-DNA presumption that wrongful convictions were rare was so ingrained that even postconviction attorneys were wary about finding defendants who were truly innocent. But soon enough they discovered, case after case, that errors were rampant, Findley said.

"When the first DNA exonerations came along, they were shocking," Findley said. "They were stunning because not only did they prove with near certainty — as near as you can get — that an innocent person had been wrongly convicted, but they told us who it was: they gave us a name, a face, a story, a life."

Although DNA testing applied only in a small subset of cases — where a suspect left biological evidence at the crime scene — those exonerations provided unprecedented proof that many practices previously relied on in the justice system were actually faulty, and often led to wrongful convictions.

"DNA testing proved it was the gold standard. It proved definitively that wrongful convictions occur," said Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former journalist at the Chicago Tribune who is now a senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations.

That reckoning helped focus the national attention on practices such as mistaken eyewitness identification procedures, coercive police interrogations, poor defense lawyering, withholding of exculpatory evidence and a wide range of error-prone forensic methods.

"DNA testing has led to a lot of criminal justice reforms that are designed to increase accuracy," Daniel Medwed, a leading legal scholar on wrongful convictions and postconviction remedies, told Law360.

With DNA testing providing scientific near-certainty of innocence, even nonscientific evidence pointing toward exoneration such as a witness recanting their testimony, or a defendant recanting self-incriminating statements, began to be regarded as more valuable overall.

In the decades since its onset, DNA technology itself has also continued to evolve, becoming more accurate and requiring less biological evidence than in the past.

Forensic investigators are able to extrapolate DNA profiles from skin cells left through casual contact on open surfaces, a method known as touch DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, which is stored inside parts of cells responsible for creating energy and can be recovered in skeletal remains, shed hairs or hair fragments, can be used to identify people in cases where samples are degraded or old.

"As DNA has become more precise, it's not only more accurate but it also requires less biological evidence, which means it's available in more cases," Medwed said. "Nowadays, DNA testing is often available at the beginning of cases, so you can weed out innocent suspects."

The Reality of Procedural Obstacles

In the initial years DNA testing was available, convicted people often faced uphill battles to access that testing. Prosecutors were often successful in persuading judges, typically the ones who presided over the original trials, to deny motions for DNA testing.

Over time, however, as exonerations occurred more often, political pressure increased on state legislators to enact laws creating a legal path for prisoners to obtain DNA testing. New York was first in 1994, followed by Illinois in 1997. A later wave of statutes created mechanisms to ensure that evidence was preserved so that it could be tested later.

In the mid-2000s, prosecutorial offices began creating conviction integrity review units. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins formed the first substantial one in 2007.

But just as they created access, legislatures also imposed conditions on when courts may order testing. Depending on the state, defendants may have to either be incarcerated, file within prescribed deadlines, overcome restrictions tied to guilty pleas or confessions or to show that favorable DNA results likely would have changed the outcome of their trial.

Postconviction DNA testing isn't without downsides. It can be costly and time-consuming. Still, the cumulative effect of these barriers is troubling because they eliminate a tool that could either confirm the integrity of a conviction or expose a wrongful one, Medwed said.

"Anything that reinforces accuracy — even if the test validates the conviction — that's a positive thing. It reinforces our sense of the integrity of the system," he said.

There have been cases in which DNA testing confirmed guilt. For example, Roger Keith Coleman, who maintained his innocence until his execution in Virginia in 1992 for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, was posthumously linked to the crime by DNA testing in 2006, confirming the jury's verdict.

The Virginia PostConviction DNA Testing Program, a state-funded initiative that reviewed archived case files from 1973 to 1988, shows how postconviction DNA testing can be used to reinforce confidence in the original verdicts, in addition to exonerating innocent people. While the project led to 13 exonerations and identified previously unknown perpetrators in at least 16 cases, DNA testing also showed that, among 227 sexual assault convictions that produced determinate results, 187 yielded inculpatory results, meaning the convicted person was not excluded as the source of the biological evidence.

Not every procedural requirement carries equal weight, experts say. Attorneys who litigate postconviction DNA cases say the most consequential obstacle is often the "materiality" standard, which generally requires defendants to show that favorable DNA results would likely have changed the outcome of their trial.

"The biggest hurdle to overcome is the materiality standard," Chase Baumgartner, a staff attorney at the Innocence Project of Texas and former DNA analyst, told Law360. "The courts say, 'even if you got all the DNA testing you wanted, it wouldn't make a difference in your case. So we're not going to waste the time and effort and money to do this because it just wouldn't make a difference.'"

Mike Ware, executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, said that requirement can force courts to speculate about the value of evidence before it has ever been tested.

"It's kind of almost putting the cart before the horse because you really cannot definitively say how material the results are going to be until you know what the results are," Ware said.

He pointed to the case of Steven Phillips as an example of why courts should be cautious about denying DNA testing based on predictions of what the evidence will show.

In Phillips' case, the state successfully argued that DNA testing was unnecessary because multiple eyewitnesses had identified Phillips as the perpetrator of a series of sexual assaults in the Dallas area, making identity irrelevant. Testing was ultimately conducted anyway, Ware said, and it excluded Phillips as the source of the biological evidence and identified the actual perpetrator through a direct DNA comparison.

Reed's Long Fight for DNA Testing

In 2001, Texas enacted Chapter 64, one of the nation's earliest postconviction DNA testing statutes. The law created a procedure allowing convicted defendants to seek DNA testing of biological evidence under specified conditions.

Reed turned to Chapter 64 in 2014 after years of unsuccessfully seeking DNA testing of the belt, asking a Bastrop County court to order modern testing of what prosecutors identified as the murder weapon. His attorneys argued that advances in forensic science since his 1998 trial could recover biological material from the woven belt and help determine who handled it.

Texas argued that Reed failed to satisfy several of Chapter 64's requirements, including demonstrating that the belt had been preserved with an adequate chain of custody. Prosecutors also contended that any DNA recovered could reflect genetic material that was casually transferred prior to the crime and, in any event, would not likely have changed the outcome of Reed's trial.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately denied the motion, finding that the belt was "contaminated" because it had been "handled by ungloved attorneys, court personnel, and possibly the jurors." The court also concluded that Reed had not shown that exculpatory testing results would have resulted in his acquittal.

Reed then sued in federal court, arguing that the state courts' interpretation of Chapter 64's chain-of-custody requirements violated his due process rights. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Reed's lawsuit was timely and could proceed but did not decide whether he was entitled to DNA testing.

Jane Pucher, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project who represents Reed, called it "baffling" that DNA evidence could be used to secure convictions but resisted when it could potentially help the defense.

"It's incredibly powerful evidence that is just sitting in the clerk's office available to be tested," Pucher said in an interview with Law360. "It makes no sense to have a statute that allows for access to postconviction testing, to have a murder weapon that is going to have on it the DNA from the person who committed this crime, and having that be sitting there and not tested."

Pucher said testing could be completed in a matter of weeks, with the Innocence Project covering the cost, yet the litigation over access to the evidence has stretched on for more than a decade. During that time, Texas even sought an execution date for Reed in 2019 before it was ultimately stayed.

Pucher said testing the belt's inner grooves, areas less likely to contain DNA from ordinary handling, could help identify who strangled Stites.

"We know that the person who committed this crime, who strangled her, necessarily used a lot of force, held the belt for a long time, probably sweat on the belt," Pucher said. "If there is DNA in there, it's from the perpetrator."

In an amicus brief supporting Reed's latest appeal, Baumgartner, the former DNA analyst, argued that even accounting for possible contamination, testing the belt could still include or exclude Reed or Fennell "with above 95% accuracy."

In March, however, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called it "inexplicable" that prosecutors continued to oppose DNA testing of the belt "despite the very substantial possibility that such testing could exculpate Reed and identify the real killer."

"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," Justice Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Finality Versus Innocence Claims


Battles around access to DNA testing replicate a long-standing tension at the heart of the criminal justice system: the one between a defendant's claims of innocence and the resolution of criminal cases, known as finality.

Prosecutors tend to oppose processes that risk delaying judgment becoming final. One example is the habeas corpus process, through which people seek to vacate their convictions based on claims of constitutional violations in their criminal cases. The process of obtaining DNA testing triggers a similar dynamic.

Findley said that some prosecutors embrace the use of postconviction DNA testing, and even initiate the testing process. Others vehemently resist it, even in cases where the same technology was used to secure a defendant's conviction.

"It's a form of hypocrisy," Findley said. "To some prosecutors and some courts, finality to them becomes more important than ultimate justice, than getting it right, and that's deeply problematic."

Findley said resistance is often fueled by confirmation bias: Prosecutors and courts are so convinced in the guilt of a defendant and so invested in the outcome of a case that they cannot conceive the possibility that DNA testing could produce a different result.

"The system is so attached to this notion of finality that often prosecutors and courts resist, even when the DNA could be fairly significant, principally because they remain convinced the person is guilty," Findley said. "Remember that in every one of the DNA exonerations, the system was convinced the person was guilty."

Baumgartner said Reed's case has taken on significance beyond his own conviction because the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' interpretation of Chapter 64 is now being cited in other cases to oppose postconviction DNA testing.

One example, he said, is Paul Shoemaker, a client of the Innocence Project of Texas who was convicted of felony murder in the death of Richard Reyes, who was shot outside the Valle Vista Apartments in Harlingen, Texas. Shoemaker is seeking DNA testing of a lighter that prosecutors say the shooter used just minutes before the killing and that police recovered the following morning.

The lighter has remained stored in a sealed evidence envelope at the police station. Prosecutors successfully argued that the evidence should not be tested because, under the TCCA's ruling in Reed's case, the markings on the evidence envelope — such as officers' initials and dates — raise chain-of-custody concerns similar to those the court found dispositive in Reed. The state said there were many possible contributors to the DNA on the lighter, arguing it was unlikely that any identified DNA would identify the shooter.

"Reed's case has kind of exploded beyond his and has become a new way to deny testing when the DNA does matter in the case," Baumgartner said.

Ware said denying DNA testing based on technical interpretations of Chapter 64 undermines what the statute was designed to accomplish.

"You have to ask yourself: why would the state ever oppose a Chapter 64 motion?" he said. "They don't want to be embarrassed by an exoneration. Never mind that it might allow them to go out and catch the actual perpetrator and, you know, enhance public safety."

--Editing by Tim Ruel and Alex Hubbard.

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