Court rules in favor of death row inmate 

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a Texas man on death row can bring a federal civil rights claim to challenge the constitutionality of state laws governing DNA testing. By a vote of 6-3, the justices cleared the way for Ruben Gutierrez’s challenge to move forward – and potentially obtain DNA testing that he contends will clear him. 

In a 14-page opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Gutierrez’s case was “indistinguishable” from the court’s 2023 decision in Reed v. Goertz, in which the court revived another Texas inmate’s effort to seek DNA evidence that he contended would exonerate him. 

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. In Alito’s view, the ruling’s “only practical effect will be to aid and abet Gutierrez’s efforts to run out the clock on the execution of his sentence. And if the decision is taken seriously as a precedent on” the legal right to sue, Alito added, “it will do serious damage.” 

Gutierrez has been on death row for more than a quarter-century after being convicted of the 1998 murder of 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison. The Supreme Court has twice blocked his execution shortly before it was scheduled to take place – once in 2020, when Gutierrez challenged the state’s policy of barring all chaplains and spiritual advisers from the execution chamber, and again last July, to give the justices time to consider his appeal in this case. 

Although Gutierrez acknowledges that he was involved in a plan to rob Harrison of more than a half-million dollars in cash that she kept in her Brownsville, Texas, home, he says that he never went into the house – much less participated in her murder. 

Gutierrez has been seeking DNA testing of evidence found at the crime scene for more than a decade. He says that DNA from, for example, a hair or nail scrapings from Harrison’s finger would prove that he never entered Harrison’s home, and therefore the jury would not have sentenced him to death. 

In 2011, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals – the state’s highest court for criminal cases – rejected Gutierrez’s efforts to obtain DNA testing. It reasoned that state law would only permit the testing if Gutierrez could prove that, with that evidence, he wouldn’t have been convicted.

In 2020, Gutierrez filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the district attorney who prosecuted him and the local police chief. He contended that the state’s DNA testing procedures violated his constitutional right to fair treatment by the government. 

Senior U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle agreed with Gutierrez. Although state law gives prisoners the right to file a second request for post-conviction relief if they can provide “clear and convincing” evidence that they should not have been sentenced to death, she reasoned, the state’s DNA testing laws take away a prisoner’s ability to obtain that evidence. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit tossed out Tagle’s decision. By a vote of 2-1, it ruled that Gutierrez did not have standing to sue because the courts could not provide him with a remedy. The majority explained that under the state court’s decision, even if Gutierrez did not go into Harrison’s home, he still would have been eligible for the death penalty because of his involvement in the robbery scheme that led to her murder and therefore prosecutors would not be likely to order DNA testing.  

On Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed. In her opinion for the court, Sotomayor dismissed the 5th Circuit’s effort to distinguish Reed from Gutierrez’s case as “wrong twice over.” First, she observed, Gutierrez’s complaint boils down to an argument “that, to the extent Texas law precludes him from obtaining the requested evidence, it violates his rights under the Due Process Clause.” Although the ruling by the court of appeals may have rested on its conclusion that even a favorable ruling by the district court, if reinstated, still would not provide Gutierrez with a remedy, Gutierrez’s right to bring his lawsuit “does not depend on the relief the District Court granted on the merits,” Sotomayor reasoned. 

Second, Sotomayor continued, the 5th Circuit should not have relied on a “guess as to whether a favorable court decision will in fact ultimately cause the prosecutor to turn over the evidence.” As in Reed’s case, Sotomayor noted, a ruling in Gutierrez’s favor would provide a remedy for his injury “by removing the allegedly unconstitutional barrier” that Texas DNA-testing laws “erected between Gutierrez and the requested testing.” 

Sotomayor also rejected the prosecutor’s assertion that the case is moot – that is, no longer a live dispute – because he rejected Gutierrez’s request for DNA testing even after Tagle had ruled in Gutierrez’s favor. She observed that a claim like Gutierrez’s, alleging a violation of his constitutional right to due process, “is not mooted by the defendant’s mid-appeal promise that, no matter the result of a lawsuit, the ultimate outcome will not change.” Otherwise, she wrote, defendants could simply “manufacture mootness by ensuring that, no matter what procedures a court requires the defendant to employ, the same substantive outcome will result.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett filed a short opinion in which she agreed in part with Sotomayor’s opinion and agreed with the result that the majority reached. She would rule for Gutierrez, she wrote, based only on the ground that the 5th Circuit’s effort to distinguish Gutierrez’s case from Reed had not accounted for “the breadth of the relief that Gutierrez requested in his complaint.” But the majority’s opinion “muddies the waters of standing doctrine,” she argued, when it went further and addressed the portion of the lower court’s ruling involving whether a decision for Gutierrez will actually help him.

Justice Clarence Thomas filed a separate dissenting opinion in which he contended that the court should not have intervened in Gutierrez’s case at all. “The Constitution,” he wrote, “does not require any State to establish procedures for state prisoners to challenge the validity of their convictions after trial.” The Supreme Court’s decision to step in and eventually revive Gutierrez’s challenge, he concluded, “serves no purpose other than to exacerbate the already egregious delays endemic to capital litigation.”

In his dissent, Alito complained that the majority’s ruling had “flagrantly distort[ed] the standard that Reed articulated.” If that test were applied correctly, he suggested, “a plaintiff like Gutierrez must show that a favorable decision on his constitutional claim is ‘substantially likely’ to prompt the district attorney to allow DNA testing” – something that “is most unlikely” to happen in this case.