Supreme Court lets Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed pursue DNA lawsuit

WASHINGTON (CBSNewsTexas.com/AP) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that longtime Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed should have a chance to argue for testing of crime-scene evidence that he says will help clear him.

The justices, in a 6-3 decision, sent Reed's case back to a lower court for his constitutional challenge to the state's law on DNA testing.

The issue before the high court was whether Reed, sentenced to death nearly 25 years ago, waited too long to file his lawsuit claiming that untested crime-scene evidence would exonerate him.

Texas courts and the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that he missed the deadline.

But the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, reversed the appellate ruling.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented. "If there is a mitigating factor to today's decision," Thomas wrote, it's that the outcome "is no barrier to the prompt execution of Reed's lawful sentence."

Reed was scheduled to be put to death in November of 2019 before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and Texas Parole Board stayed the execution indefinitely.

Reed received the death penalty after he was convicted in 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 southeast of Austin.

Reed has long maintained that Stites' 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.

Reed has attracted support from around the world, including from Dr. Phil, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna, as well as lawmakers from both parties.

Source: cbsnews.com, Staff, April 19, 2023

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

Florida | Jury recommends death sentence for Jeffrey Crum in killing of 12-year-old girl

BROOKSVILLE, Fla. — A Hernando County jury has recommended the death penalty for a 65-year-old man who was found guilty last week of raping and killing 12-year-old Jennifer Odom. Sentencing for Jeffrey Crum was held this week. Crum abducted Odom in 1993 after she stepped off her school bus in Pasco County. Her body was found in a Hernando County orange grove six days later.

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Japan executes man convicted of killing five in 2009 Osaka pachinko parlor arson

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Israel builds execution chamber for Palestinians convicted of murder

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Alabama is trying a death penalty bait-and-switch

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