The U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday in favor of Ruben Gutierrez, who for nearly 15 years has sought DNA testing to help prove he was wrongfully sentenced to death. The decision comes after the Court stopped Texas from putting Mr. Gutierrez to death last summer—just 20 minutes before his scheduled execution.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the Court, which held by a 6-3 vote that Mr. Gutierrez could sue the local district attorney for violating his constitutional right to due process by refusing to allow DNA testing of evidence in his custody.
Ruben Gutierrez was convicted of capital murder under a Texas law providing that an accused person can be found guilty of capital murder where he was merely a party to a crime (such as robbery) that resulted in a person’s death—even if he did not actually kill the victim.
A death sentence, however, may be imposed only if the State proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant “actually caused the death,” “intended to kill” the victim, or “anticipated” that the victim would be killed.
Mr. Gutierrez never disputed that he and two other men planned to rob Escolastica Harrison’s house in Brownsville, Texas, while she was not home.
But he insists that, as he twice told the police before they coerced him into a contradictory statement, he never entered the home that night, when the other two men went inside and fatally stabbed Ms. Harrison. And because he did not cause, intend, or anticipate Ms. Harrison’s death, he asserts he should never have been sentenced to death.
Since 2010, Mr. Gutierrez has repeatedly requested DNA testing of evidence, including hair and blood samples from the scene, that would help prove he never entered the home that night.
But the state courts refused to order testing, finding that Mr. Gutierrez was not entitled to DNA testing to show he was wrongly sentenced to death unless the results would also prove he was innocent of the underlying crime.
Mr. Gutierrez then sued the district attorney, Luis Saenz, in federal court, for violating his due process rights by precluding him from obtaining the requested evidence. The federal trial court agreed it was fundamentally unfair for Texas to block him from DNA testing unless he could show innocence of the crime.
The State appealed, and a divided panel of the Fifth Circuit held that Mr. Gutierrez was not allowed to sue because, even if he won a federal court order declaring it unconstitutional, the prosecutor still would refuse to turn over the evidence.
That decision violated the Supreme Court’s decision in the “indistinguishable” case of Rodney Reed, another man sentenced to death in Texas who was refused DNA testing.
The Court held in 2023 that Mr. Reed had standing to sue because a federal court order declaring Texas’s DNA testing procedures unconstitutional would eliminate the prosecutor’s unlawful justification for denying DNA testing.
“The same is true here,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, adding that the Fifth Circuit erred by “transforming” the question of whether a federal court could grant relief into “a guess as to whether a favorable court decision will in fact ultimately cause the prosecutor to turn over the evidence.”
“That a prosecutor might eventually find another reason” to deny DNA testing, does not bar Mr. Gutierrez from arguing that the district attorney’s “cited reasons violated his rights under the Due Process Clause.”
The Court reversed and sent the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings.
Shawn Nolan, counsel for Mr. Gutierrez, said the decision brought his client “one step closer to proving that he was wrongfully sentenced to death.”