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The U.S. Supreme Court on March 23 declined to hear Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed’s latest appeal, leaving in place a lower-court ruling that blocks new DNA testing on the belt used to strangle Stacey Stites in 1996.
The court gave no explanation for the denial, which is standard, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
A Case That Has Never Stopped Raising Doubts
Reed was convicted in 1998 of Stites’s murder in Bastrop County, Texas, and sentenced to death. Prosecutors relied heavily on DNA evidence showing Reed’s sperm in Stites’s body.
Reed has long argued that he and Stites were having a consensual relationship and that her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, killed her. The Fifth Circuit summarized that core dispute last year, noting that Reed’s defense has always been that someone else, possibly Fennell, committed the murder.
What Reed Wanted Tested
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At the center of the fight is Stites’s webbed belt, the murder weapon. Reed’s lawyers argued that modern DNA testing on the belt could identify biological material left by the killer during the strangulation.
In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the belt likely contains important DNA evidence because it was used with “great force” for several minutes. Reed’s team has also said it was willing to pay for the testing.
Why the Courts Said No
The legal battle turned on Texas’s post-conviction DNA testing law, known as Article 64. Texas courts previously held that Reed could not satisfy chain-of-custody requirements showing the evidence had not been materially altered.
After the Supreme Court revived Reed’s federal lawsuit in 2023 on procedural grounds, the Fifth Circuit again ruled against him in May 2025, holding that he had not plausibly shown Texas’s system was so unfair that it violated due process.
Sotomayor’s Warning
Sotomayor’s dissent was narrow but sharp. She said the Fifth Circuit failed to grapple with one of Reed’s main arguments: that even evidence with contamination concerns can still produce meaningful and probative DNA results.
She argued the Supreme Court should have sent the case back for fuller review rather than letting the lower-court ruling stand. Her dissent leaned on the court’s own language from earlier cases that DNA testing has a singular capacity to clear the innocent and identify the guilty.
Why the Denial Matters
The denial does not amount to a declaration that Reed’s conviction is beyond dispute. It means only that fewer than four justices voted to hear the case. Still, the practical effect is severe.
Reed loses, for now, his clearest remaining path to force DNA testing through the Supreme Court.
The Broader Question
Reed’s case sits at the uneasy intersection of finality and forensic science. Since the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, the justices have resisted creating a broad constitutional right to post-conviction DNA testing, leaving most of the power with state legislatures and courts.
Reed’s loss shows how high those barriers remain, especially in capital cases where the stakes could not be higher.
