This morning, the Supreme Court held 6 to 3 that death row inmate Ruben Gutierrez has standing to bring his § 1983 claim challenging Texas’s postconviction DNA testing procedures under the Due Process Clause. Gutierrez v. Saenz, No. 23-7809 (June 26, 2025) (opinion here). In doing so, the Court reaffirmed that Due Process lives:
Individuals convicted of crimes in state court have a liberty interest in demonstrating [their] innocence with new evidence under state law. District Attorney’s Office for Third Judicial Dist. v. Osborne, 557 U. S. 52, 68 (2009). For that reason, a state-created right to postconviction procedures can, in some circumstances, beget yet other rights to procedures essential to the realization of the parent right.
(internal quotation marks omitted). This outcome may not seem surprising to some considering Reed v. Goertz, 598 U.S. 230 (2023) (holding, among other things, state prisoner sentenced to death sufficiently alleged standing in § 1983 action against Texas prosecutor in challenging constitutionality of Texas’s post-conviction DNA statute). But the mischief is always in the details.
Gutierrez was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1999 for his involvement in the robbery and murder of Escolastica Harrison in Brownsville, Texas. For the last 14 years, Texas courts have denied Gutierrez’s requests for post-conviction DNA testing to prove that his limited culpability in the underlying offense renders him ineligible for the death penalty both under Texas law and the Eighth Amendment. He sought a declaratory judgment in federal district court that Texas’s post-conviction DNA statute—Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 64 (Chapter 64)—violates procedural due process by permitting DNA testing only where favorable results would go to the defendant’s actual innocence rather than his ineligibility for a death sentence. 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 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.” Hmm, why wouldn’t a state follow a federal declaratory judgment? In this case, the Fifth relied on a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals opinion, which had “already found that Gutierrez would have no right to DNA testing even if the statutory bar to testing for evidence about sentencing were held to be unconstitutional.” This might strike some as passing strange—that standing would turn on whether a state prosecutor represents that he will (or will not) comply with a federal court order, which would allow obstinacy to defeat standing.
The Supreme Court reversed and remanded. Justice Sotomayor delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Jackson, and in which Justice Barret joined as to part II.B.2. Barrett filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. Justice Thomas dissented. Justice Alito also filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Just Thomas and Gorsuch.
Justice Sotomayor’s majority opinion starts like this:
The Fifth Circuit … held that Gutierrez lacked standing to bring his §1983 suit, reasoning that, even if a federal court declared Texas’s procedures unconstitutional, the local prosecutor would be unlikely to turn over the physical evidence for DNA testing. That holding contravenes Reed v. Goertz, 598 U. S. 230 (2023), where this Court decided on analogous facts that another Texas prisoner had standing to sue the local prosecutor who denied him access to DNA testing. Id., at 234. Put simply, Reed 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. Ibid.; see Tex. Code Crim. Proc. Ann., Art. 64.01 (Vernon 2018). The same is true here and the Court therefore reverses.
This opinion is worth a full read for all Due Process fans. The briefing is available on the Supreme Court's docket here.