Emergency docket

Court blocks Texas execution

The Supreme Court blocked the execution of Ruben Gutierrez, who was sentenced to die after 7 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday for the 1998 stabbing death of 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison in Brownsville, Tex. In a brief unsigned order released to reporters just after 6:30 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday night, the justices put Gutierrez’s execution on hold until they decide whether to take up his appeal.

Gutierrez has long maintained that he did not go into Harrison’s home on the night of the murder, and he did not know that anyone would be harmed. As Gutierrez’s case comes to the Supreme Court, it centers on his efforts to obtain access to the physical evidence in his case – including scrapings from under Harrison’s nails and a loose hair wrapped around her finger – so that he can test it for DNA evidence at his own expense. His initial efforts in the state courts were unsuccessful, but a federal district court ruled in 2021 that the Texas law governing postconviction DNA testing violates an inmate’s constitutional right to due process.

Last year, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that decision, holding that Gutierrez did not have a legal right, known as standing, to bring his challenge. The court of appeals denied Gutierrez’s request to reconsider that decision in late May.

Gutierrez came to the Supreme Court on June 25, asking the justices to stay his execution. In a petition for review that accompanied his request for a stay, he argued that his case was “indistinguishable” from that of another Texas man, Rodney Reed, who sought DNA testing to provide evidence that he maintained would clear him. In that case, Gutierrez contended, the Supreme Court “made clear that the standing requirements are not onerous in this context,” but the court of appeals “grafted on” “an additional layer of standing analysis that led to the opposite result,” by speculating that state officials would not allow DNA testing because, “in earlier proceedings, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals … commented that favorable DNA test results would not prove Gutierrez innocent of the death penalty.”

The state urged the justices to stay out of the dispute, characterizing Gutierrez’s argument as resting on an “overwrought interpretation” of the “Fifth Circuit’s straightforward application of this Court’s holding in Reed v. Goertz.” Gutierrez, the state contended, effectively is seeking “to make the standing analysis a rote exercise and a foregone conclusion in every case involving a challenge to the constitutionality of a state’s postconviction DNA testing procedures.”  

Tuesday was not the first time that the Supreme Court had put Gutierrez’s execution on hold. In 2020, it granted him a stay of execution just one hour before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, because the state would not allow him to have a spiritual advisor or member of the clergy in the execution chamber with him.