The US Supreme Court cleared the way Wednesday for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed to conduct DNA testing on evidence his lawyers say could help exonerate him.
Reed, an African American man, was convicted in 1998 of killing Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old white girl, in Bastrop.
Reed has maintained his innocence and has been engaged in a years-long battle to obtain evidence from the crime scene, including the murder weapon, tested for traces of DNA.
“Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a critical step toward the ultimate goal of obtaining DNA evidence in the Rodney Reed case,” said Parker Rider-Longmaid, one of Reed’s attorneys. “We are grateful that the Court has held the courthouse doors open for Mr. Reed, a black man who has spent 24 years on death row for the murder of a white woman with whom he was having an affair, a crime of which he has firmly maintained that he had nothing to do with it.
Reed was scheduled to be executed in November 2019, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution and sent his case to a lower court to review new claims, including that Reed was innocent. But after a 2021 evidentiary hearing, the district judge ruled against granting Reed a new trial.
The inmate asked the state to analyze DNA evidence that he said would exonerate him, but the state argued against that test, saying crime scene items were improperly stored and therefore could be contaminated. . In 2014, a district court ruled in favor of the state, and in 2017, the Criminal Appeals Chamber upheld that decision.
The issue before the Supreme Court was whether Reed waited too long to seek relief in federal court; The statute of limitations for claims in the process is two years. The State argued that the clock was ticked after Reed lost at trial in 2014.
Reed’s lawyers contended that the clock was ticked after the Criminal Court of Appeals denied Reed’s motion for rehearing in October 2017. His federal civil rights lawsuit was filed in August 2019.
In an amicus curiae brief in the case, the NAACP argued that the decision to limit the amount of time an inmate has to file due process claims “would disproportionately harm African-Americans and other people of color, who are more likely to wrongfully convicted and must rely on access to DNA evidence to prove their innocence.”
The high court agreed that the statute of limitations “begins to run when the state litigation ends, in this case when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Reed’s motion for rehearing.” In a 6-3 decision, Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote that starting the clock before the state court process is exhausted would encourage plaintiffs to file state and federal lawsuits simultaneously, creating “parallel litigation.”
“We see no good reason for such pointless duplication,” Kavanuagh wrote.
Kavanaugh was joined by judges Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. Reed’s case will now go back to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which will reconsider his request for DNA testing.
