SCOTUS grants relief to death row inmate seeking DNA testing

The US Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that a Texas death row inmate has the right to sue over the state’s laws governing DNA testing, reported Jurist. The majority opinion was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Ruben Gutierrez was convicted of capital murder in 1998. Since 2010, he has been unsuccessfully requesting DNA testing of crime scene evidence he claimed would prove he was not in the victim’s home the night of the murder. Texas’ Article 64 allows DNA testing where a “convicted person establishes by a preponderance of the evidence” that he “would not have been convicted if exculpatory results had been obtained through DNA testing.”

Gutierrez filed a §1983 lawsuit in federal court against Luis Saenz, the district attorney who has custody of the untested evidence. Gutierrez argued that Texas’ state post-conviction DNA testing procedures violated his liberty interests under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The trial court agreed and granted declaratory relief. However, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed, holding that Gutierrez lacked standing because his claimed injury was not redressable since a declaratory judgment would be unlikely to cause the prosecutor to allow testing. The defendants additionally argued to the Supreme Court that the prosecutor has several independent state-law grounds not to provide the DNA testing.

The Supreme Court disagreed and found Gutierrez had standing based on its precedent concerning standing for a due process claim against custodians of evidence. They explained that “if a federal court concluded that Texas’ postconviction DNA testing procedures violate due process, the state prosecutor’s justification for denying DNA testing would be eliminated, thereby removing the barrier between [Gutierrez] and the requested testing.” Furthermore, the possibility that “a prosecutor might eventually find another reason to deny a prisoner’s DNA testing request does not eliminate the prisoner’s standing to argue that the cited reasons violated his rights under the Due Process Clause.”

The defendants also argued that the case is moot after Sanez refused “Gutierrez’s DNA testing request even after the District Court issued the declaratory judgment.” The court disagreed, explaining that holding so “would allow defendants to manufacture mootness by ensuring that, no matter what procedures a court requires them to employ, the same substantive outcome will follow.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett issued a concurrence opinion stating she would reverse the Fifth Circuit’s decision on the sole basis that “it failed to consider the breadth of the relief that Gutierrez requested in his complaint.”

Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the majority, holding that it ignored that precedent “held that…declaratory judgment would redress the prisoner’s deprivation of DNA testing because it would ‘substantially’ alter the likelihood of the district attorney’s ordering DNA testing.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined Alito’s dissent. Thomas wrote separately to emphasize that “this Court has no business intervening in this case in the first place” because the original meaning of “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment “did not include entitlements to government-created benefits” and “likely referred only to freedom from physical restraint.”

While Gutierrez’s request for rehearing was pending in the Fifth Circuit, Texas scheduled his execution. The court had pre­vi­ous­ly issued a stay of exe­cu­tion to Gutierrez on July 16, 2024, just 20 min­utes before he was sched­uled to be executed.

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