Supreme Court Hears Argument on Deadline for Texas Death-Row Prisoner to Challenge State Court’s Denial of DNA Testing

The U.S. Supreme Court heard argu­ment on October 11, 2022 on whether a Texas death-row pris­on­er was time-barred from obtain­ing fed­er­al review of the state’s refusal to grant him DNA test­ing that could prove his inno­cence because he wait­ed for the state appeals process to fin­ish before fil­ing his federal lawsuit.

The tech­ni­cal issue in Reed v. Goertz is when the two-year time clock began to run on Rodney Reed​’s fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit alleg­ing that Texas had uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly denied him access to crime-scene evi­dence for DNA test­ing. The prac­ti­cal issue was whether, in a racial­ly charged case, pros­e­cu­tors could pre­vent a Black man who says he was hav­ing a secret affair with a white woman from con­duct­ing DNA test­ing on the mur­der weapon to prove that her racist fiancé was the actual killer. 

Reed (pic­tured) was sen­tenced to death by an all-white jury in Bastrop, Texas, for the mur­der of 19-year-old Stacey Stites in 1998, whom pros­e­cu­tors said he also had raped. Reed assert­ed that Stites’s fiancé, Jimmy Fennell — a for­mer police offi­cer who was lat­er con­vict­ed of sex­u­al­ly assault­ing a woman he had tak­en into cus­tody — had com­mit­ted the murder. 

Texas had argued, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had agreed, that the time clock began to run the moment the Texas tri­al court turned down Reed’s request for DNA test­ing in 2014, even though the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) did not rule on Reed’s appeal of the tri­al court rul­ing until April 2017 and did not deny his request for a rehear­ing until October of that year. Reed filed his civ­il rights suit in August 2019.

Reed’s lawyer, Parker Rider-Longmaid, told the Court that the statute of lim­i­ta­tions for Reed’s civ­il rights suit began to run at the com­ple­tion of state court review of his appeal, which in this case was once the TCCA denied his peti­tion for rehear­ing. Such a rule would per­mit the state court to author­i­ta­tive­ly con­strue its law state and would trig­ger the fed­er­al statute of lim­i­ta­tions at a time that was ​“sim­ple, pre­dictable, and sen­si­ble.” Any rule that starts the fed­er­al time clock soon­er, he said, ​“dis­re­spects the state courts appellate process.”

Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone backed off the Fifth Circuit’s hold­ing, say­ing that Reed’s time clock com­menced ​“no lat­er than” the issuance of the TCCA’s deci­sion in April 2017 deny­ing Reed’s appeal. To do oth­er­wise, he said, would per­mit death-row pris­on­ers to strate­gi­cal­ly delay, ​“to essen­tial­ly avail them­selves of end­less pro­ce­dure.” He con­ced­ed, how­ev­er, that a court’s deci­sion to grant rehear­ing would reset the time clock.

Court observers agreed that the jus­tices seemed poised to reject the Fifth Circuit’s stan­dard but, as SCOTUSblog report­ed, ​“there was no clear con­sen­sus” on which of the two alter­na­tives the Court preferred.