Justices Take on DNA-Testing Appeal Timing in Innocence Case

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case of a Texas death-row prisoner who claims he’s innocent and has garnered support ranging from Kim Kardashian to Ted Cruz.

Granting review Monday of Rodney Reed’s appeal, the justices will examine issues related to DNA testing and statutes of limitations in a dispute that could affect other people claiming innocence as well.

Reed’s appeal involves federal civil-rights actions where plaintiffs seeking crime-scene evidence testing try to show that state DNA procedures denied them due process.

The issue is whether the statute of limitations starts to run when state-court litigation is over, including appeals, or if it starts when the state trial court denies testing.

The federal appeals courts are split on the question, Reed said in his petition.

The Fifth and Seventh Circuits’ latter approach “makes no sense,” Reed said in the petition filed by lawyers from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and the Innocence Project. The New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit ruled against Reed, calling his claim time-barred. The Eleventh Circuit ruled the other way.

Federal civil-rights actions like Reed’s “cannot accrue before the state courts authoritatively construe and apply state law,” he said in the petition. It noted that “all fifty states have postconviction DNA-access statutes, and DNA evidence has exonerated hundreds of individuals over the last thirty years.”

Reed was convicted of the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites, with whom he said he had an affair. The prosecution pointed to Reed’s semen being recovered from Stites as proof that he killed her. He said that’s consistent with the affair and that state forensic witnesses have since abandoned or modified their conclusion that it necessarily links him to the murder.

Reed also pointed to another perpetrator: Stites’ fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, a prosecution witness who was a police officer then and later served a 10-year sentence for raping a woman when he was on duty.

Fennell had told a colleague that he would strangle Stites with a belt if she cheated, and he knew about the affair, Reed said. Stites was strangled, apparently with a belt. Fennell invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when called to testify in postconviction proceedings.

Opposing high-court review, Texas officials accused Reed of dilatory litigation tactics and said the justices “should not, and need not, countenance those efforts.”

The case is Reed v. Goertz, U.S., No. 21-442.