WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a decision the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Ruben Gutierrez, a man sentenced to death in Texas, can move forward with a federal civil rights lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s DNA testing procedures.
The 6–3 decision allows Gutierrez to pursue testing of key crime scene evidence that he believes could demonstrate he was wrongly sentenced to death for a 1998 murder in Brownsville.
Writing for the majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated that Gutierrez has standing under federal civil rights law to argue that Texas’s restrictive approach to postconviction DNA testing violates his due process rights. The opinion noted that Gutierrez’s case is “indistinguishable” from the Court’s 2023 ruling in Reed v. Goertz, which revived another challenge to Texas’s procedures by a different man sentenced to death.
The ruling marks the second time the Supreme Court has intervened in Gutierrez’s case. In 2020, the justices halted his execution over concerns about religious rights after Texas refused to allow a spiritual advisor in the death chamber. In 2023, they again paused his execution, this time to review his efforts to access untested DNA evidence.
Gutierrez has spent over 25 years on death row following his conviction for the robbery and murder of 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison. Prosecutors alleged that Gutierrez entered Harrison’s home and stabbed her with a screwdriver during a failed robbery, while Gutierrez has consistently maintained that he never entered the home and was not involved in the killing.
He acknowledges being part of a plan to rob Harrison, who was known to keep large amounts of cash in her home, but says he expected the theft to occur while she was away and believed no one would be harmed. The state’s case relied heavily on a statement Gutierrez gave to police, which he says was coerced. There was no physical evidence linking him to the murder scene.
For more than a decade, Gutierrez has sought DNA testing of key items recovered from the crime scene—including fingernail scrapings from Harrison, a loose hair, and blood samples—arguing the results could exclude him and support his claim that he never entered the residence. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his requests in 2010 and again in 2019, interpreting state law to allow DNA testing only if it could prove innocence of the underlying crime, not just reduce a sentence.
Texas law permits a death sentence only when the defendant actually caused a death, intended to kill, or anticipated that a death would occur. Gutierrez contends that DNA evidence could bolster his claim that he did none of those things, and that his role in the robbery should not have resulted in a capital sentence. The state’s interpretation, however, has effectively barred him from testing that might establish he should not have received the death penalty.
In 2020, Gutierrez filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, naming Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz, whose office retains custody of the untested evidence. Gutierrez argued that Texas’s DNA testing procedures, as applied, violated his constitutional right to due process. A federal district court sided with Gutierrez and issued a declaratory judgment in his favor, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the decision, ruling 2–1 that Gutierrez lacked standing because the court could not compel the prosecutor to allow testing.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling. Sotomayor wrote that the lower court had “turned the Article III standing inquiry on its head” by speculating whether a favorable ruling would ultimately lead the prosecutor to authorize testing. She noted that the question before the Court was whether the lawsuit could proceed—not whether Gutierrez would ultimately obtain relief.
“A declaratory judgment in Gutierrez’s favor would redress his injury by removing the allegedly unconstitutional barrier Texas law erected between Gutierrez and the requested testing,” Sotomayor wrote. She also rejected the state’s argument that the case was moot because the district attorney continued to deny testing even after the earlier court ruling. Allowing that rationale, she warned, would enable defendants to “manufacture mootness” simply by refusing to comply with constitutional procedures.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority in part and concurred in the judgment. She agreed that Gutierrez should prevail, but argued the Court had gone too far in applying a relaxed standard of redressability based on procedural injury cases. “By invoking [those precedents] in the unique context of requests for DNA evidence from Texas prosecutors, the Court muddies the waters of standing doctrine,” she wrote.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Alito accused the majority of “flagrantly” distorting the Court’s precedent in Reed, insisting that Gutierrez’s case was distinguishable because, in his view, Texas courts had already ruled that even favorable DNA results would not impact Gutierrez’s culpability under Texas law.
“The only practical effect of today’s decision will be to aid and abet Gutierrez’s efforts to run out the clock on the execution of his sentence,” Alito wrote. He suggested that the Court’s opinion would encourage further delays in capital cases without necessarily offering meaningful relief.
Thomas wrote separately to express his broader skepticism of the constitutional basis for postconviction relief.
“The Constitution does not require any State to establish procedures for state prisoners to challenge the validity of their convictions after trial,” he wrote, arguing that the Court’s intervention “serves no purpose other than to exacerbate the already egregious delays endemic to capital litigation.”
But the majority forcefully pushed back against that view. “Due process does not countenance procedural sleight of hand whereby a state extends a right with one hand and then takes it away with another,” the Court stated, echoing language from the district court that originally sided with Gutierrez.
The ruling does not guarantee that Gutierrez will ultimately receive DNA testing. But it sends the case back to the Fifth Circuit and reopens the door for federal courts to consider whether Texas’s procedures unlawfully prevent people sentenced to death from using forensic evidence to challenge their punishment.
Shawn Nolan, one of Gutierrez’s attorneys, welcomed the decision. “This ruling brings Ruben Gutierrez one step closer to proving that he was wrongfully sentenced to death,” Nolan said in a statement. “It is a critical step toward truth and accountability.”
