Texas Death Row Inmate Rodney Reed Loses At Supreme Court
HOUSTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling refusing DNA testing of additional evidence in the lengthy case of a man condemned for the rape-slaying of a Central Texas woman.
Attorneys for 50-year-old prisoner Rodney Reed sought the new testing on items investigators collected related to the 1996 abduction, rape and strangling of 19-year-old Stacy Stites. Her body was found off the side of a road about 35 miles southeast of Austin.
The high court's refusal, without comment Monday, upholds the Texas court's April 2017 decision that also said Reed's lawyers were intending to "unreasonably delay" his execution.
Reed, who has maintained his innocence, was arrested nearly a year after Stites' killing when his DNA surfaced in an unrelated sexual assault.