The Supreme Court cleared the way for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed -- who has had support from celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Rihanna -- to seek post-conviction DNA evidence to prove his innocence.
Reed claims an all-White jury wrongly convicted him of killing of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old White woman, in Texas in 1998. Texas had argued that he had waited too long to bring his challenge to the state’s DNA procedures in federal court, but the Supreme Court disagreed. Now, he can go to a federal court to make his claim. The ruling was 6-3.
Alito, joined by Gorsuch in his dissent, said Reed should have acted more quickly to bring his appeal. “Instead,” Alito wrote, “he waited until an execution date was set.” Alito charged Reed with making the “basic mistake of missing a statute of limitations.” DNA evidence could point elsewhere Reed has been on death row for the murder of Stites. A passerby found Stites’ body near a shirt and a torn piece of belt. Investigators targeted Reed because his sperm was found inside her.
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