The following pending petitions involve issues of interest to capital habeas litigators:
Reed v. Goertz, 24-1268 (cert. petition filed June 10, 2025)
Question presented:
In 2023, the Court reversed the Fifth Circuit’s holding that Rodney Reed’s DNA-testing suit was untimely and rejected District Attorney Bryan Goertz’s jurisdictional arguments. Reed v. Goertz, 598 U.S. 230 (2023). The case now returns on the merits, as Goertz continues refusing to test the murder weapon.
Reed has been on death row for over a quarter century for a crime he steadfastly maintains he didn’t commit. Since he was convicted, Reed has amassed a “substantial body of evidence” refuting the state’s theory of the case. Reed v. Texas, 140 S. Ct. 686, 689 (2020) (statement of Sotomayor, J., respecting the denial of certiorari). Despite the resulting “pall of uncertainty over Reed’s conviction,” id. at 690, Goertz refuses to DNA-test the murder weapon—testing that Reed’s attorneys have offered to pay for and that could prove his innocence. Instead, Goertz relies on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal’s (CCA) authoritative construction of Texas’s postconviction DNA-testing statute, Article 64 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, to insist that Reed isn’t entitled to DNA testing. The CCA’s construction rests, among other things, on the notion that potentially “contaminated” evidence cannot yield probative DNA results—a notion that science disproves and that Texas itself rejects in many cases when seeking to prove guilt.
The question presented is whether Article 64, as authoritatively construed by the CCA, violates due process by arbitrarily denying prisoners access to postconviction DNA testing, rendering illusory prisoners’ state-created right to prove their innocence through newly discovered evidence.