Reluctant prosecutor can't 'manufacture mootness' or ruin standing for inmate seeking DNA test, SCOTUS says
A Texas death row inmate who wants DNA testing to establish that he wasn’t at a murder scene, although he helped plan a robbery there, has standing to challenge the state law governing testing procedures, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 for Texas inmate Ruben Gutierrez, who claims that he could challenge the law, even though prosecutors might not grant a DNA test if he wins. He has standing, no matter what the prosecutor may do, the majority said in an opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Her opinion was joined in full by the other liberal justices on the high court and by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined all but one section of Sotomayor’s decision.
A DNA test might affect Gutierrez’s sentence but not his conviction. Texas law allows testing only in cases that could lead to an overturned conviction. Gutierrez claimed that the law violates his rights under the due process clause.
Texas state law provides that a defendant can be found guilty of capital murder, even when they were merely a party to the crime resulting in death. But a defendant can’t be sentenced to death unless they caused the death, intended to kill or anticipated that a person would be killed.
Gutierrez claims that he thought that his two accomplices would rob an empty mobile home in the 1998 incident and never anticipated that someone would be killed. He twice told police that he was never inside the mobile home but later gave police a statement that said he was inside the mobile home while an accomplice fatally stabbed Escolastica Harrison with a screwdriver. He now claims that the confession was coerced.
Gutierrez has sought DNA testing since 2010 to establish that only his accomplices were inside the mobile home, and he is ineligible for the death penalty.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New Orleans had held that Gutierrez’s claimed injury could not be redressed by a win in his challenge to the statute because the prosecutor would be unlikely to allow the DNA test in any event. Several independent grounds support the prosecutor’s refusal to grant a DNA text, and the Texas law was just one reason, the federal appeals court said.
Sotomayor said the 5th Circuit erred by “transforming the redressability inquiry into a guess as to whether a favorable court decision will in fact ultimately cause the prosecutor to turn over the evidence.”
Sotomayor said the 5th Circuit wrongly distinguished Reed v. Goertz, a 2023 Supreme Court decision allowing a lawsuit by an inmate who sought a DNA test in a federal civil rights suit. The declaratory judgment requested by the inmate in that prior case was “no more likely to yield a change in the district attorney’s conduct than the one Gutierrez sought here,” Sotomayor wrote.
The fact that the prosecutor in Gutierrez’s case refused to allow the DNA test after Gutierrez won in the federal district court does not make the inmate’s appeal moot, Sotomayor said.
“A procedural due process claim, like the one Gutierrez presses, is not mooted by the defendant’s mid-appeal promise that, no matter the result of a lawsuit, the ultimate outcome will not change,” Sotomayor wrote. “Holding otherwise would allow all manner of defendants to manufacture mootness.”
In a partial concurrence and a concurrence in the judgment, Barrett said Sotomayor’s opinion “muddies the waters of standing doctrine” by “borrowing from our somewhat-relaxed redressability inquiry in administrative-law procedural-injury cases.”
Justice Samuel Alito dissented in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Alito said the majority “blatantly alters” the Reed test for standing.
“It then has the audacity to criticize the 5th Circuit for applying the real Reed test,” Alito wrote.
Shawn Nolan, a lawyer for Gutierrez, released this statement: “Today, Ruben Gutierrez is one step closer to proving that he was wrongfully sentenced to death. The court’s decision makes clear that Ruben has a legal right to challenge the Texas post-conviction DNA statute, which limits his access to DNA testing to show he should not have been sentenced to death. We trust the Cameron County district attorney will heed the Supreme Court’s decision and provide us, at long last, with access to the extensive forensic evidence in Ruben’s case.”
The case is Gutierrez v. Saenz.
Hat tip SCOTUSblog, which had early coverage of the decision.
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