What happened
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Rodney Reed's latest challenge over access to DNA testing in his Texas death-penalty case, drawing a dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Reed has spent years seeking testing of evidence that he says could help prove his innocence, including the belt used to strangle Stacey Lee Stites. Justice Sotomayor wrote that "It is inexplicable" that the Bastrop County District Attorney's Office has refused to allow testing of the belt despite the possibility that results could exculpate Reed and identify the real killer.
The case leaves in place a Fifth Circuit ruling that rejected Reed's due process challenge to Texas' postconviction DNA-testing framework after an earlier trip to the Supreme Court revived his Section 1983 suit on timeliness grounds. The latest Supreme Court action is a denial of certiorari, not a merits decision by the court.
Reed's challenge focused on Article 64, Texas' postconviction DNA-testing statute, which requires a court to find a sufficient chain of custody showing the evidence has not been materially substituted, tampered with, replaced or altered. Texas courts rejected Reed's request after findings that the belt had been contaminated by handling from ungloved attorneys, court personnel and possibly jurors.
On remand from the Supreme Court's 2023 timeliness ruling, Reed argued in the Fifth Circuit that the noncontamination rule was arbitrary because DNA testing can still yield highly probative results from supposedly contaminated evidence. He also argued that it was unfair to hold contamination against prisoners when the state controls the evidence and that Texas imposes a stricter burden on prisoners seeking postconviction testing than on prosecutors using DNA evidence at trial.
Justice Sotomayor said the Fifth Circuit addressed Reed's arguments about state control of evidence and different postconviction burdens, but did not squarely confront the separate argument that the noncontamination requirement itself lacked a legitimate purpose. If Reed is right that testing the belt is likely to produce an accurate result despite contamination, she wrote, Texas' reliance on that requirement could arbitrarily deny him the chance to prove innocence with new evidence.
The dissent said the proper course would have been to vacate and remand so the Fifth Circuit could consider Reed's argument first. Because the court declined to do so, Justice Sotomayor warned that Texas may execute Reed without determining whether Reed's or another man's DNA is on the murder weapon.