SCOTUS Rules Death Row Inmate Has Standing to Challenge Post Conviction DNA Testing Procedures

In Gutierrez v. Saenz, 606 U.S. ____ (2025), the U.S Supreme Court ruled that a death row inmate has standing to bring his claim challenging Texas’s postconviction DNA testing procedures under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. 

Facts of the Case

In 1998, Texas charged Ruben Gutierrez with capital murder for his involvement in the killing of Escolastica Harrison. The State’s theory at trial was that Gutierrez wielded one of the two screwdrivers used to stab Harrison to death in her mobile home. The jury convicted Gutierrez of capital murder.

At the sentencing phase of Gutierrez’s trial, the jury was required to answer whether Texas proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Gutierrez “actually caused” Harrison’s death or, if not, “that he intended to kill [her]” or “anticipated that a human life would be taken.” The jury answered yes, and Gutierrez was sentenced to death.

For nearly 15 years, Gutierrez has sought DNA testing of evidence he claims would prove he was not in Harrison’s home the night of the murder. Texas’s 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,” among other criteria. Invoking Article 64, Gutierrez twice moved in state court for DNA testing of untested crime scene evidence.

The trial court denied his first request in 2010, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) affirmed. The court reasoned that even if Gutierrez’s DNA was not found on the tested items, that would not establish his innocence of capital murder because he would still be a party to the robbery that resulted in Harrison’s death. The court concluded that Gutierrez could not use Article 64 to show he was wrongly sentenced to death unless he could also establish his innocence of the underlying crime.

In 2019, Gutierrez again sought DNA testing, but Texas courts denied his motion. On appeal, the TCCA reiterated that DNA testing was not available show only death penalty ineligibility. Gutierrez then filed suit in federal court under 42 U.S.C. §1983 against Luis Saenz, the district attorney who has custody of the untested evidence.

Gutierrez argued that Texas’s DNA testing procedures violated his liberty interests in utilizing state postconviction procedures. The District Court agreed and granted declaratory relief, finding it fundamentally unfair that Texas gives prisoners the right to challenge their death sentence through habeas petitions but prevents them from obtaining DNA testing to support those petitions unless they can establish innocence of the underlying crime.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the District Court’s judgment and held that Gutierrez lacked standing to bring his §1983 suit, finding that his claimed injury was not redressable because a declaratory judgment would be unlikely to cause the prosecutor to “reverse course and allow testing.”

Supreme Court’s Decision

The Supreme Court disagreed. It held that Gutierrez has standing to bring his §1983 claim challenging Texas’s postconviction DNA testing procedures under the Due Process Clause.

In reaching its decision, the Court found the Fifth Circuit’s decision contravenes Reed v. Goertz, 598 U.S. 230 (2023), in which the Court decided on analogous facts that another Texas prisoner had standing to sue the local prosecutor who denied him access to DNA testing. In Reed, the Court specifically held that a federal court order declaring “that Texas’s post-conviction DNA testing procedures violate due process” would redress the prisoner’s claimed injury by “eliminat[ing]” the state prosecutor’s reliance on Article 64 as a reason for denying DNA testing.

As Justice Sotomayor explained, the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to distinguish Reed “fails twice over.” First, the Court found that to the extent the Fifth Circuit based its assessment of redressability on the declaratory judgment the District Court later issued, rather than Gutierrez’s complaint, it “turned the Article III standing inquiry on its head.” Contrary to the Fifth Circuit’s holding, the Court emphasized that Gutierrez’s standing does not depend on the relief the District Court ultimately granted on the merits.

Second, the Court found that the Fifth Circuit erred in transforming the redressability inquiry into a guess about whether a favorable court decision will ultimately result in the prosecutor turning over the DNA evidence.“That a prosecutor might eventually find another reason, grounded in Article 64 or elsewhere, to deny a prisoner’s request for DNA testing does not vitiate his standing to argue that the cited reasons violated his rights under the Due Process Clause,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
Finally, the Court also rejected the argument that case is now moot because the state prosecutor refused Gutierrez’s DNA testing request even after the District Court issued the declaratory judgment. As Justice Sotomayor explained, Gutierrez’s claim, 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.” If that were not the case, 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.”