Supreme Court Lets Rodney Reed, a Texas Death Row Inmate, Seek DNA Testing

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with Rodney Reed, a death row inmate in Texas whose case has attracted wide attention, in his efforts to obtain DNA testing that he says may help prove his innocence.

Mr. Reed was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites, who was strangled to death with her own belt in Bastrop County, Texas. DNA collected from Ms. Stites’s body matched that of Mr. Reed.

Mr. Reed, who is Black, initially denied knowing Ms. Stites, who was white, but later said they had been romantically involved. He said another man, perhaps Ms. Stites’s fiancé, had committed the murder.

The jury rejected Mr. Reed’s defense, and he was sentenced to death.

His case drew intense interest from lawmakers and celebrities, including Kim Kardashian and Rihanna, and a Texas appeals court halted his execution in 2019, returning the case to a state trial court.

Mr. Reed sought to test some 40 items of evidence, including the belt, but a state judge denied the request, saying that the chain of custody had not been reliable and that Mr. Reed could not show that he would have been acquitted even if the DNA results turned out to be favorable. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal matters, affirmed the ruling and later denied rehearing.

Mr. Reed then sued in federal court, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that his request was barred by a two-year statute of limitations. The panel said that Mr. Reed should have sued within two years after the state trial judge ruled against his request for testing.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for six members of the Supreme Court, disagreed, saying the statute of limitations began to run “when the state litigation ended and deprived Reed of his asserted liberty interest in DNA testing.” The crucial date, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, was “when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Reed’s motion for rehearing.”

The alternative, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, would be piecemeal and parallel litigation. “We see no good reason for such senseless duplication,” he wrote.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion in the case, Reed v. Goertz, 21-442.

In dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, said he might be prepared to assume that the deadline for Mr. Reed’s lawsuit was prompted by the state appeals court’s ruling on the merits. But, he said, Mr. Reed had missed that deadline and should not have been allowed to reset the clock based on the appeals court’s routine denial of his motion for reconsideration.

In a separate dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said that there was no doubt of Mr. Reed’s guilt and that federal courts had no role to play in ensuring his access to DNA evidence. Justice Thomas appeared to urge officials in Texas to execute Mr. Reed even while his efforts to obtain the DNA evidence moved forward.

“If there is a mitigating factor to today’s decision,” he wrote, it is that the lawsuit “the court misguidedly allows to proceed is no barrier to the prompt execution of Reed’s lawful sentence.”

Parker Rider-Longmaid, one of Mr. Reed’s lawyers, said in a statement that the Supreme Court’s ruling was “a critical step toward the ultimate goal of getting DNA testing in Rodney Reed’s case.”