14-year fight for DNA testing goes under Supreme Court microscope 

WASHINGTON (CN) — Ruben Gutierrez has spent over a decade trying to overturn his death sentence for a 1999 murder. At the Supreme Court next week, he has to convince the justices his fight isn’t meaningless.

Gutierrez was convicted of capital murder for what prosecutors described as a robbery gone wrong. Gutierrez and two others planned to rob 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison, who kept over $600,000 in her home because she distrusted banks.

The trio planned to lure Harrison out of her mobile home, but instead, two men entered Harrison’s home and stabbed her to death with two screwdrivers.

Gutierrez admits that he planned the robbery, but he says he never entered Harrison’s home and didn’t participate in her murder. For 14 years, Gutierrez has tried to get DNA testing of crime scene items to prove his innocence, but Texas’ strict rules for post-conviction testing have stymied his effort.

Texas law allows prisoners sentenced to death to bring habeas claims challenging their eligibility for the death penalty. However, the state’s post-conviction DNA testing statute of limitations runs out before those same prisoners can bring a claim.

Gutierrez said the law “makes the post-conviction remedy ‘illusory’ by extinguishing a claim before [he] and those similarly situated can even bring it.”

If the circumstances of Gutierrez’s case sound familiar, it’s because the Supreme Court heard a similar case less than two years ago. In 2023, the justices ruled to let Rodney Reed challenge whether Texas’ DNA testing statute violated his due process rights.

In a nearly identical claim to Reed’s, Gutierrez said Texas’s DNA testing statute — Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 64 — violated his due process rights by only permitting testing to prove innocence, rather than his ineligibility for the death penalty.

Still, the Fifth Circuit ruled against Gutierrez, finding that he didn’t have standing to challenge Texas’ DNA testing regulations because he was unlikely to succeed in future litigation.

According to the Fifth Circuit, Gutierrez needed to prove that a prosecutor would be likely to grant access to the requested evidence should he obtain a favorable federal court ruling. Based on the appeals court’s review, the testing would be “meaningless” because the evidence couldn’t be used to change the fact that he was eligible for the death penalty.

Gutierrez told the Supreme Court that the ruling went far beyond Reed , creating an additional requirement of a record-scouring, predictive determination that the defendants in a particular case will actually comply with a federal court’s judgment. He warned that the Fifth Circuit’s test would give states a path to defeat similar claims.

“Standing does not turn on whether the defendant represents that he will comply with a court order — that would allow obstinacy to defeat standing — but on whether a favorable result would ‘order[] a change in [the] legal status’ between the parties,” Gutierrez wrote.

Gutierrez said the predictive ruling — whether it’s plausible or likely — deprived him of his right to be heard and his right to develop and assert his death-eligibility claim.

A public interest think tank said that the case isn’t about access to DNA evidence, but instead the power of the federal courts to hear constitutional disputes. Gutierrez’s claim falls under a landmark Reconstruction statute, Section 1983.

Congressional lawmakers enacted the provision in response to Southern state officials who continued to violate the rights of Black Americans after the Civil War. Section 1983 created a right to sue in federal court when state officials deprive another person of their constitutional rights.

The Constitutional Accountability Center said the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on Gutierrez’s case turns Section 1983 on its head.

“That novel requirement empowers state actors — those who ‘might, in fact, be antipathetic to the vindication of [federal] rights,’ — to manipulate the jurisdiction of federal courts to hear suits alleging constitutional violations by those very state actors,” the think tank wrote.

Over a dozen Southern states led by Arkansas filed a brief opposing Gutierrez. The states said a ruling in his favor would merely waste state and federal resources on needless litigation.

“Prisoners like Gutierrez are not entitled to federal-court advisory opinions on the procedural fairness of state DNA-testing regimes,” the states wrote. “States should not be haled into court unless a prisoner can meet the requirements of Article III standing that apply in all other constitutional litigation.”

Texas said the Court of Criminal Appeals already held Gutierrez would be ineligible for DNA testing because the outcome would not change his sentence. The Lone Star State said a Texas prosecutor is more likely to follow the appeals court ruling rather than a declaratory judgment with no effect on Gutierrez’s ultimate eligibility for DNA testing.

“Multiple, independent state-law grounds that are unaffected by the district court’s declaratory judgment continue to support Saenz’s decision to deny Gutierrez access to the evidence for DNA testing — and thus block his path to filing a state habeas application accompanied by the DNA testing results,” Texas wrote. Luis Saenz is the district attorney of Cameron County, Texas, a defendant in Gutierrez’s case.

Intervention in death row appeals has become exceedingly rare at the Supreme Court, but Gutierrez is breaking that trend. In 2020, his execution was delayed when the justices reviewed Texas’ ban on clergy accompanying inmates in the execution chamber.

When the justices issued their opinion in Reed , Texas had a pending appeal of Gutierrez’s case in the lower court.

Last July, the Supreme Court granted Gutierrez an additional execution delay to hear this appeal.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in Ruben Gutierrez v. Luis Saenz on Monday.

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