Alito, J., dissenting
squarely rejects that conclusion, Brief for Petitioner 48; Tr. of Oral Arg. 12–13, and the Court reserves judgment. Ante, at 6, n. 1.) But that is where the Court’s reasoning is likely to lead.
Reed tries to circumvent this problem by distinguishing between a claim that challenges the literal terms of a state law and one that challenges the law as authoritatively interpreted by the State’s highest court. Brief for Petitioner 30, 48. On this view, only claims of the latter type would have to proceed through the entire state court appellate process before a §1983 challenge could be brought. But this categorization of DNA-testing claims is problematic. When a State’s high court interprets a state law, it generally settles what the law always meant, and therefore it is hard to see the difference between a claim that the text of a state statute is unconstitutional and a claim that the text is unconstitutional as interpreted by the State’s highest court. In the case of a state law like Article 64, which permits DNA testing under limited circumstances, the court may interpret the statute to impose requirements that are not expressly spelled out in the statutory text. (That is what happened here.) Or the state high court may interpret requirements in the text more leniently than a literal reading of the text would demand. In either event, the statute means what the state high court says it means, and if accrual in the first of these situations does not take place until the end of appellate review, it is hard to see why the same should not be true in the second as well.
In light of these problems, it is not surprising that the Court declines to say anything about whether prisoners who wish to challenge a state DNA testing law may sue as soon as their testing requests are denied. The Court says only that it “need not address th[e] hypothetical scenario” of a plaintiff who declines “full appellate review,” ante, at 6, n. 1, but what does that mean? Does it mean that such a plaintiff must exhaust state remedies at the trial level but
