The Supreme Court denied Rodney Reed’s last chance to test a murder weapon, upholding a delay in DNA analysis.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed’s final appeal to test a webbed belt used in the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites, upholding a lower court’s ruling that his request was filed too late. Reed, who maintains his innocence and claims the real killer was Stites’ white fiancé, former police officer Jimmy Fennell, argues the belt likely contains the killer’s DNA. Prosecutors have refused to allow testing, citing contamination concerns, a decision upheld by courts despite criticism from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who called the refusal “inexplicable.” The ruling leaves Reed’s execution possible without testing the key piece of evidence, marking the second time in under three years the high court declined to intervene in his case.