Will the Supreme Court allow DNA testing for Rodney Reed?

Rodney Reed is a Black man on death row in Texas.

And if you believe him and dozens of witnesses who have come forward to corroborate his story, his only crime was having an affair with the white fiancee of a white police officer.

Reed was convicted of raping and murdering a 19-year-old woman who was engaged to a police officer. But after Reed’s conviction, the police officer was convicted of kidnapping and assaulting a woman at gunpoint — and a man incarcerated with him came forward to allege that the officer confessed to killing his fiancee.

Texas is so hellbent on seeing Reed executed that they’re refusing to conduct DNA testing on crucial crime scene evidence, so Reed’s lawyers took his fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reed has already faced two execution dates. Now with the court set to rule on the question of DNA testing, the clock is ticking — and The Intercept is racing to make sure the world hears about evidence that could exonerate Reed before it’s too late.

With a possibly innocent man’s life on the line, we’re asking Intercept readers to make a donation to help us continue to investigate this case and expose the gross injustices of the death penalty in the U.S.

The state’s case against Rodney Reed simply doesn’t hold up.

Prosecutors’ theory of the crime turned on the fact that sperm recovered from Stacy Stites’s body matched Reed. Reed maintains that he and Stites were having an affair. The state claims that Reed and Stites didn’t even know each other, but multiple witnesses, including a co-worker who saw the two together at Stites’s job, back up Reed’s story.

Meanwhile, the state’s version of events relies on the assertions of one man: Stites’s fiance, Jimmy Fennell, who twice failed polygraph tests about his role in the killing. Several people have recounted that he knew about Stites’s affair with Reed and was furious that she was involved with a Black man.

After Fennell pleaded guilty to kidnapping and assaulting another woman while on duty and in uniform in 2007, a man incarcerated with Fennell came forward to say that Fennell told him he’d “taken care” of Stites “and that damn ‘N’ is going to do the time.”

DNA testing of items taken from the crime scene could exonerate Reed, but Texas is claiming that Reed waited too long to challenge the state’s testing denial in federal court. Now, his life is in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Intercept’s Jordan Smith has been investigating this case — and the racism and injustice of the U.S. death penalty system — for more than two decades. To support our ongoing reporting, will you make a donation to The Intercept today?

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