Supreme Court grants last-minute stay in Texas execution of man requesting DNA tests

The Supreme Court stayed the execution of Ruben Gutierrez in Texas on Tuesday, less than 30 minutes before the state was slated to carry out a death sentence by lethal injection for the 1998 murder of a retired teacher. Gutierrez says he didn't kill the woman — and that DNA testing of evidence would bolster his claim.

Gutierrez has failed in multiple attempts to have DNA analysis conducted in his case. He's asked the Supreme Court to stay his execution and review lower court rulings on the matter, saying his constitutional rights are being violated by Texas laws limiting how and why DNA evidence can be tested.

Here's a brief guide to the case:

Gutierrez was convicted in 1999

Escolastica Harrison, 85, was killed in 1998 during a burglary of her home, where she kept large amounts of cash. She lived in and managed a trailer park in Brownsville, Texas, after retiring from teaching. Because of her aversion to banks, she had some $600,000 in the home that she shared with her nephew, Avel Cuellar.

Gutierrez, who is now 47, learned about the hoard of cash because he had been friends with Cuellar and ran errands for Harrison, according to court records.

Prosecutors said three men — Gutierrez, Rene Garcia and Pedro Gracia — took part in the robbery, saying it turned violent after they failed in their initial plan to distract Harrison and take the money.

"The evidence showed that two of the three men entered the mobile home and that Harrison was stabbed to death by two screwdrivers during the burglary," Gutierrez's defense team said in a court filing in March. Gutierrez says he did not enter Harrison's trailer the day she died.

DNA tests have been denied for more than a decade

Since at least 2010, Gutierrez has been seeking DNA testing of several items from the crime scene, as noted in court documents: "(1) a blood sample taken from the victim; (2) a shirt belonging to Cuellar that had blood stains on it; (3) nail scrapings from the victim; (4) several blood samples from in the home; and (5) a loose hair recovered from the victim's finger."

As the Texas Tribune reports, Gutierrez’s attorneys have suggested Cuellar, who has since died but was briefly considered a suspect in the case, played a central role in the crime against his aunt.

Texas courts have repeatedly denied Gutierrez's DNA testing requests. In 2011, the Court of Criminal Appeals said in part that the Texas law on DNA testing "does not authorize testing when exculpatory testing results might affect only the punishment or sentence that he received," according to court documents.

The Court of Criminal Appeals has said that because Gutierrez took part in a crime that resulted in death, he would still be subject to a capital murder charge under the state's law of parties. But Gutierrez's defense team says that if exculpatory DNA evidence had been available at trial, “jurors would not have convicted him of capital murder or sentenced him to death."

The appeals court also said that one piece of evidence, the hair found around Harrison's finger, couldn't be tested because it was no longer in state custody. But when Gutierrez was appointed new representation in 2019, they "located the loose hair … in a sealed envelope in the District Attorney's files," according to a filing by his defense team.

What happens now?

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to accept Gutierrez's case. If it does, the stay on his execution will remain until the justices issue a ruling on the DNA testing question.

If the Supreme Court declines the case, the stay on Gutierrez's execution will lift automatically.

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Gutierrez's request for a stay earlier this year, saying that he lacked standing and that his case wasn't affected by a 2023 Supreme Court ruling in a Texas case that also involved a man on death row seeking DNA evidence testing. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with defendant Rodney Reed's due process claim, sending the case back to the Fifth Circuit.

The Fifth Circuit's majority opinion denying Gutierrez's request said his circumstances are too different from Reed's to follow the same legal rationale. But his defense team disagrees — and it says the law limiting Texas' post-conviction DNA testing procedures are unconstitutional.

Texas has four more executions scheduled for later this year.