Supreme Court Rejects Rodney Reed Appeal for DNA Testing in Texas Death‑Penalty Case

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, March 23, 2026, refused to hear Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed’s latest appeal seeking DNA testing of the webbed belt used to strangle 19‑year‑old Stacey Stites in Bastrop in 1996, leaving intact an adverse ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a split decision with the three liberal justices dissenting, the Court let stand Texas prosecutors’ refusal to allow testing of the belt, even though Reed’s defense team offered to pay for it and argues the killer’s sweat and skin cells should be embedded in the belt’s fibers. State courts had previously held that Texas’s DNA‑testing statute does not apply to items that may have been contaminated, a standard Reed’s lawyers say is applied selectively because the state routinely relies on allegedly contaminated evidence at trial and the government controlled how the belt was handled. Reed, a Black man sentenced to death for Stites’ rape and murder, maintains he was in a consensual relationship with her and that her white fiancé, then‑police officer Jimmy Fennell, killed her in anger over their interracial affair; Fennell, who later served prison time for an unrelated sexual assault, denies involvement. The decision follows a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that had revived Reed’s broader constitutional challenge to Texas’s DNA‑testing law, and it keeps him on death row without access to the specific testing his defense says could exonerate him, a result likely to intensify debate over racial bias, capital punishment and post‑conviction evidence rules.