Rodney Reed on Texas death row in September 2019. Credit: Tiffany McMillan/Innocence Project
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed, who claims untested crime-scene evidence will help clear him.
Reed was sentenced to death for the 1996 killing of 19-year-old Stacey Stites. Prosecutors say Reed raped and strangled Stites as she made her way to work at a supermarket in Bastrop, a rural community about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Austin.
Reed has long maintained that her fiance, former police officer Jimmy Fennell, was the real killer. Reed says Fennell was angry because Stites, who was white, was having an affair with Reed, who is Black. Fennell, who served time for sexual assault and was released from prison in 2018, has denied killing Stites.
The justices will take up the case in the fall. The issue is whether Reed waited too long to ask for DNA testing of items recovered from and near Stiles’ body, clothing and items found in or near Fennell’s truck.
In February 2020, the United States Supreme Court denied a cert petition by Reed asking the Court to review a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ rejection of critical evidence of innocence. The petition asked the United States Supreme Court to review new evidence and requested the Court correct constitutional errors created based on the discovery that (1) Fennell did not give a consistent account of where he was on the night Stites was murdered and (2) all of the state’s expert witnesses who supported the state’s theory that Reed raped and murdered Stites have withdrawn or modified those opinions.
Reed's supporters have included Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey, as well as lawmakers from both parties.