United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ____________ United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit

No. 19-70022 FILED May 1, 2025 ____________ Lyle W. Cayce Rodney Reed, Clerk

Plaintiff—Appellant,

versus Bryan Goertz, Bastrop County District Attorney; Steve McCraw, Texas Department of Public Safety; Sara Loucks, Bastrop County District Clerk; Maurice Cook, Bastrop County Sheriff,

Defendants—Appellees. ______________________________

ON REMAND FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES ______________________________ Before Elrod, Chief Judge, and Jones and Higginson, Circuit Judges. Jennifer Walker Elrod, Chief Judge: Rodney Reed challenges the constitutionality of Texas’s postconviction DNA-testing procedures under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The first time we heard this case, we concluded that Reed’s claim was time-barred in light of our precedent, Reed v. Goertz, 995 F.3d 425, 430–31 (5th Cir. 2021), but the Supreme Court reversed, Reed v. Goertz, 598 U.S. 230, 235–37 (2023). Turning now to the merits, we conclude that Reed has not pleaded a plausible due process violation because he has not shown that Texas’s scheme is unfair or unjust in such a way that Case: 19-70022 Document: 169-1 Page: 2 Date Filed: 05/01/2025

it is fundamentally inadequate to vindicate the substantive right to postconviction DNA testing that it confers upon him. Accordingly, we AFFIRM the district court’s dismissal of Reed’s claim I A Stacy Stites was murdered in 1996. 1 The same day that she was reported missing, her body was found on the side of the road in Bastrop County, Texas. She had been strangled with her own belt, part of which was found near her body. A truck that she shared with her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, was later found in a parking lot, the other half of Stites’s belt nearby. DNA testing matched intact sperm found in Stites’s body to Rodney Reed. Reed was charged with Stites’s murder. He defended himself on the theory that he and Stites had been carrying out an affair, that the two had engaged in consensual sex prior to Stites’s murder, and that someone else—possibly Fennell—had killed her. The jury convicted Reed of capital murder and sentenced him to death. Since his conviction, Reed has continued to press his innocence through myriad habeas petitions in state and federal court. See Ex parte Reed, 670 S.W.3d 689, 710–28 (Tex. Crim. App. 2023) (summarizing Reed’s ten state habeas petitions); Reed, 995 F.3d at 427–29 (discussing our decision in Reed v. Stephens, 739 F.3d 753 (2014) (Reed’s first federal habeas petition); In re Reed, No. 24-50529 (5th Cir. Nov. 5, 2024) (denying leave to file a second federal habeas petition). All of those petitions have been denied.

_____________________ 1 We do not attempt to recite all of the facts of Reed’s case here. For a much more thorough treatment, see Ex parte Reed, 670 S.W.3d 689, 699–743 (Tex. Crim. App. 2023).

2 Case: 19-70022 Document: 169-1 Page: 3 Date Filed: 05/01/2025

In 2014, Reed moved in Texas state court under Chapter 64 of the Texas Code of Criminal Pr