Reed v. Goertz

1 Cite as: 607 U. S. ____ (2026)
S
OTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
RODNEY REED v. BRYAN GOERTZ, IN HIS OFFICIAL
CAPACITY AS
DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF BASTROP
COUNTY, TEXAS
ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED
STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
No. 24–1268. Decided March 23, 2026
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
J
USTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and
J
USTICE JACKSON join, dissenting from the denial of certio-
rari.
“DNA testing has an unparalleled ability to both exoner-
ate the wrongly convicted and to identify the guilty.” Dis-
trict Attorney’s Office for Third Judicial Dist. v. Osborne,
557 U. S. 52, 55 (2009). For the last 11 years, death-row
prisoner Rodney Reed has sought DNA testing of key evi-
dence that could prove his innocence. Because the Fifth
Circuit did not address a potentially meritorious argument
that Reed raised in support of his claim, the Court should
summarily vacate the decision below and remand for fur-
ther consideration of Reed’s claim.
In 1998, Reed was convicted and sentenced to death for
the murder of Stacey Lee Stites. Over the last two decades,
Reed has maintained his innocence and proffered evidence
suggesting that Stites’s fiancé, a Bastrop County police of-
ficer named Jimmy Fennell, murdered Stites because Stites
and Reed were having an affair. For instance, Reed has
provided sworn affidavits attesting that Fennell told a col-
league one month before the murder that Stites was
“ ‘f***ing a n***r’” and that Fennell, while imprisoned in
2019 for an unrelated sexual-assault conviction, had con-
fessed to a fellow inmate that he “‘had to kill [his] n***r-
loving fiancé[e].’” Reed v. Texas, 589 U. S. 1239, 1240–1241

2 REED v. GOERTZ
S
OTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
(2020) (SOTOMAYOR, J., statement respecting denial of cer-
tiorari) (summarizing Reed’s evidence).
Key to Reed’s efforts to prove his innocence have been his
requests for DNA testing of multiple pieces of evidence in-
cluding, as relevant here, the murder weapon: Stites’s
webbed belt. A significant amount of the killer’s DNA is
likely to be on the belt because the killer, in an act of “‘great
force,’” used the belt to strangle Stites for “approximately
three to four minutes.” Ex parte Reed, 271 S. W. 3d 698,
705–706 (Tex. Crim. App. 2008). If that DNA is either
solely Reed’s or solely Fennell’s, that finding could finally
resolve the “pall of uncertainty over Reed’s conviction.”
Reed, 589 U. S., at 1244 (statement of S
OTOMAYOR, J.).
In 2014, Reed asked the Bastrop County District Attor-
ney to consent to the DNA testing of the belt, among other
items. (Reed’s counsel also offered to pay for the testing.)
The district attorney denied the request in relevant part.
Reed then filed a motion in state court under Article 64,
Texas’s postconviction DNA-testing statute. To order test-
ing under Article 64, a court must find, among other re-
quirements, “a chain of custody sufficient to establish that”
any evidence to be tested “has not been substituted, tam-
pered with, replaced, or altered in any material respect.”
Tex. Crim. Proc. Code Ann., Art. 64.03(a)(1)(A)(ii) (West
2018). The trial court denied Reed’s motion, and the Court
of Criminal Appeals (CCA) affirmed. The CCA upheld the
trial court’s findings that the belt was “contaminated” after
being “handled by ungloved attorneys, court personnel, and
possibly the jurors,” App. to Pet. for Cert. 65a–68a, and that
this contamination violated Article 64’s chain-of-custody re-
quirement.
Reed then sued in federal court under 42 U. S. C. §1983.
He argued that Article 64, as authoritatively construed by
the CCA, violated the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process
Clause facially and as-applied to him because it is “funda-
mentally inadequate to vindicate” a defendant’s state-

3 Cite as: 607 U. S. ____ (2026)
S
OTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
created liberty interest in proving his innocence with new
evidence. Osborne, 557 U. S., at 69. Reed contended that
the CCA’s noncontamination requirement does not “com-
por[t] with fundamental fairness,” ibid. (internal quotation
marks omitted), because it places “arbitrary limitation[s] on
. . . potential ‘exculpatory results’” despite the fact that
DNA testing can still produce probative results even when
there is “contamination,” App. to Pet. for Cert. 111a. The
District Court dismissed Reed’s complaint. The Fifth Cir-
cuit initially affirmed on the ground that Reed’s §1983 suit
was untimely, but this Court reversed. See Reed v. Goertz,
598 U. S. 230, 237 (2023).
On remand, the Fifth Circuit ordered supplemental brief-
ing on the merits of Reed’s due process claim. In his sup-
plemental brief, Reed made three related, yet independent,
arguments as to why the noncontamination requirement vi-
olates due process.
First, Reed argued that the noncontamination require-
ment is arbitrary because “DNA testing can yield highly
probative information even where crime-scene evidence
was supposedly contaminated.” Plaintiff-Appellant Supp.
Brief in No. 19–70022 (CA5), p. 21 (Reed CA5 Supp. Brief ).
Relying on amicus brief by Chase Baumgartner, a former
lead forensic scientist at the Texas Department of Public
Safety, Reed claimed that laboratories, including in the
Texas Department of Public Safety, have protocols for de-
tecting and accounting for contamination that can ensure
reliable results. See id., at 21–23 (citing Brief for Chase
Baumgartner as Amicus Curiae in Reed v. Goertz,
O. T. 2022, No. 21–442 (Baumgartner Brief )); Recording of
Oral Arg. in No. 19–70022 (CA5, Sept. 23, 2024), at 8:59–
10:05. Baumgartner stated that “[e]ven in th[e] worst-case
scenario of developing the most complex, contaminated
DNA profile that can still be interpreted,” Texas Depart-
ment of Public Safety analysts “could accurately include or
exclude [Reed] or Mr. Fennell with above 95% accuracy.”

4 REED v. GOERTZ
S
OTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
Baumgartner Brief 18. Yet, Reed maintains, Texas’s non-
contamination requirement “bars prisoners from accessing
DNA testing, no matter its reliability or the resulting unre-
liability to the truth-finding process of preventing it.” Reed
CA5 Supp. Brief 2. In other words, the core of Reed’s first
argument was that the noncontamination requirement
“serve[s] no legitimate purpose” or is “disproportionate to
the ends” that it is “asserted to promote,” Holmes v. South
Carolina, 547 U. S. 319, 326 (2006), because DNA testing
has developed such that the accuracy of the results is not
meaningfully affected by contamination.
Second, Reed argued that it is “fundamentally unfair” to
hold any alleged contamination against the prisoner be-
cause the State is “responsible for the condition of the evi-
dence” while it is stored and handled. Reed CA5 Supp. Brief
22–23.
Third, Reed argued that the noncontamination require-
ment is unfair because the burden it places on prisoners in
the postconviction context is more stringent than the bur-
den on prosecutors seeking to introduce DNA-tested evi-
dence at trial. Id., at 23–24. As Reed explained, Texas
courts routinely admit DNA test results from “contami-
nated” evidence when offered by the State seeking to secure
a conviction. Ibid.
The Fifth Circuit concluded that the noncontamination
requirement does not violate due process, but its opinion
appears to have addressed only the second and third argu-
ments made by Reed. As to the second argument, the Fifth
Circuit reasoned that “it seems both inevitable and neces-
sary that the state be tasked with storing evidence” and
that “entrusting this responsibility to the government is
[not] fundamentally unfair on its face.” 136 F. 4th 535, 545
(2025). The Fifth Circuit then rejected Reed’s third argu-
ment by explaining that it is fair to require a higher stand-
ard for postconviction prisoners because “there is no re-

5 Cite as: 607 U. S. ____ (2026)
S
OTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
quirement that postconviction relief procedures be held to
the same standards as procedures at trial.” Id., at 546.
Yet, the Fifth Circuit did not squarely confront the argu-
ment that the noncontamination requirement itself serves
no legitimate purpose because DNA testing is now capable
of generating accurate results even when the evidence has
been contaminated. If Reed is right that DNA testing the
belt is highly likely to yield an accurate result despite con-
tamination, the CCA’s reliance on the noncontamination re-
quirement to block Reed from testing it might well “violate
due process principles” by “arbitrar[ily]” denying Reed the
opportunity to prove his innocence with new evidence.
Evitts v. Lucey, 469 U. S. 387, 404 (1985); see Wolff v.
McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539, 558 (1974) (“The touchstone of
due process is protection of the individual against arbitrary
action of government”).
To be sure, the Fifth Circuit’s opinion noted that Reed
stated that “‘DNA testing can yield highly probative infor-
mation even where crime-scene evidence was supposedly
contaminated.’ ” 136 F. 4th, at 545 (quoting Reed CA5
Supp. Brief 21). It appears in context, however, that the
panel interpreted that statement as subsidiary to Reed’s ar-
gument that it is unfair to hold any contamination against
the prisoner when the State controls the evidence’s storage.
See 136 F. 4th, at 545 (characterizing Reed’s argument as
asserting it was “‘fundamentally unfair’ . . . to foreclose
testing due to deficiencies on the part of the state, especially
‘because DNA testing can yield highly probative infor-
mation even where crime-scene evidence was supposedly
contaminated’”); see also Brief in Opposition 25 (admitting
the Fifth Circuit discussed Reed’s argument only “in the
context of an imbalanced burden between the State at trial
and a prisoner postconviction”). The panel thus never di-
rectly passed upon the question whether the CCA’s applica-
tion of the noncontamination requirement violated the Due
Process Clause because it arbitrarily denied Reed the op-

6 REED v. GOERTZ
S
OTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
portunity to obtain potentially reliable and exculpatory
DNA test results from the murder weapon.
***
It is inexplicable why the Bastrop County District Attor-
ney’s Office refuses to allow DNA testing of the belt that
was used to kill Stites, despite the very substantial possi-
bility that such testing could exculpate Reed and identify
the real killer. It is also inexplicable why the courts below
did not proceed with more caution and carefully consider
each of Reed’s arguments, especially given that his claim
implicates the “constitutionally intolerable” possibility of
the “execution of a[n] . . . innocent person.” Herrera v. Col-
lins, 506 U. S. 390, 419 (1993) (O’Connor, J., concurring).
The Court should vacate the Fifth Circuit’s judgment and
remand the case for the Fifth Circuit to address Reed’s ar-
gument in the first instance. Because the Court refuses to
do so, the State will likely execute Reed without the world
ever knowing whether Reed’s or Fennell’s DNA is on the
murder weapon, even though a simple DNA test could re-
veal that information. I respectfully dissent.