The U.S. Supreme Court on March 23 refused to hear an appeal from Rodney Reed, a Texas death row inmate who has spent more than 25 years fighting for DNA testing of the belt used to strangle a 19-year-old woman in 1996. The court's six conservative justices let stand a lower-court ruling against Reed, while the three liberal justices dissented.
The decision marks the second time in less than three years that the justices have left in place a ruling against Reed from the federal appeals court in New Orleans. It also closes, for now, a case that celebrity activists and progressive legal groups have championed for years.
Reed was sentenced to death for the killing of Stacey Stites, who was strangled with a webbed belt as she made her way to work at a supermarket in Bastrop, a rural community about 30 miles southeast of Austin. Prosecutors say Reed also raped Stites. Reed has long maintained he was having a consensual affair with Stites and that her fiancé, former police officer Jimmy Fennell, killed her in a rage over the interracial relationship. Fennell has denied killing Stites, though he later served time for sexual assault and was released from prison in 2018.
Reed's legal team has pushed for years to test the belt for DNA. Texas prosecutors have refused. State and lower federal courts have backed that refusal.
The state's top criminal appeals court ruled that the Texas law on DNA testing does not apply to items that may have been contaminated. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to send Reed's case back to a lower court so he could press a constitutional challenge to the state's testing law. But Texas courts and the federal appeals court in New Orleans concluded Reed missed the deadline to bring that challenge, the Associated Press reported.
The Supreme Court, without a majority opinion explaining its reasoning, declined to intervene again.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, objected. Sotomayor called it "inexplicable" that prosecutors would refuse to allow the belt to be tested.
"Despite the very substantial possibility that such testing would exculpate Reed and identify the real killer."
That language frames the dispute as a question of innocence. But the procedural record tells a different story. Reed's claim has traveled through state courts, federal courts, and the Supreme Court itself, twice, and at every stop, a majority found the legal requirements unmet. The 2023 ruling gave Reed another shot. Lower courts determined he failed to act in time.
Sotomayor went further, writing that with the court's refusal to step in, "the State will likely execute Reed without the world ever knowing whether Reed's or Fennell's DNA is on the murder weapon." The Washington Times noted the same quotes in its coverage, confirming the three liberal justices stood alone in dissent.
Reed's case has drawn attention from Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, and Oprah Winfrey, among others. That celebrity backing helped delay a scheduled execution years ago and kept the case in the public eye. But fame doesn't override filing deadlines.
The core legal question was never whether DNA testing sounds reasonable in the abstract. Plenty of people might think testing a murder weapon is common sense. The question was whether Reed's claims met the specific requirements of Texas law and whether his federal challenge was timely. Courts at every level said no.
That distinction matters. The justice system runs on rules, statutes of limitations, procedural deadlines, evidentiary standards. When courts enforce those rules, it isn't a cover-up. It's the system working as designed. If the rules need changing, the Texas legislature can change them. That's how constitutional government operates.
Sotomayor's dissent leans hard on the possibility that testing could free Reed. But possibility is not probability, and neither is proof. Reed's semen was found in Stites' body. His defense rests on the claim of a consensual affair, a claim prosecutors dispute. The belt, tested or untested, doesn't erase that forensic evidence.
The dissent also skips past a key fact: Reed had his chance. The Supreme Court handed him a 6-3 victory in 2023, sending the case back for exactly the kind of challenge he wanted to bring. He missed the window. Three liberal justices now want the court to rescue him from that failure.
This is the pattern. When procedural rules produce outcomes progressives dislike, the rules themselves become the villain. Deadlines are "technicalities." Evidentiary standards are "obstacles to justice." The system is only legitimate when it delivers the preferred result.
Meanwhile, the victim, Stacey Stites, 19 years old, strangled on her way to work, fades into the background of a celebrity cause.
Reed's defenders point to Jimmy Fennell's later conviction for sexual assault as evidence that he could have killed Stites. Fennell denied killing her. He served his time and was released in 2018. His criminal record is ugly, but a subsequent conviction for a different crime is not proof of murder. Courts have weighed this argument repeatedly and found it insufficient to override the trial verdict.
Reed has had more than a quarter-century of legal proceedings. He has had the attention of the nation's highest court, twice. He has had celebrity advocates and sympathetic media coverage. What he has not had is a legal argument that survived the procedural requirements every defendant must meet.
Six justices recognized that. Three did not.
Deadlines exist for a reason. So does finality. A justice system that bends its own rules every time a case attracts famous supporters isn't a justice system at all, it's a popularity contest with life-and-death stakes.
