Today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear another Texas death row inmate’s case challenging the state’s DNA testing statute as unconstitutional. Gutierrez v. Saenz, No. 23-7809 (Oct. 4, 2024) (cert. granted).
Petitioner Ruben Gutierrez was sentenced to death in Texas in 1999 for the stabbing death of Escolastica Harrison. The prosecution’s theory at trial was that Gutierrez and two others planned to lure Harrison out of her mobile home and steal cash hidden inside. Evidence showed two men entered the mobile home and stabbed Harrison to death with screwdrivers. For the last 13 years, Gutierrez—who maintains that he neither entered Harrison’s home nor knew anyone would be harmed—has sought exculpatory DNA testing under Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 64 (“Chapter 65”) of items recovered from the crime scene. He has fought for more than a decade to test the biological evidence to establish that he did not actually kill, intend to kill, or anticipate that someone would be killed.
After the Texas trial court and Court of Criminal Appeals twice denied Gutierrez’s request for DNA testing, he filed a § 1983 complaint in district court challenging the constitutionality of Texas’s post-conviction DNA testing procedures, as well as Texas’s execution protocol, which at the time did not allow a spiritual advisor to be in the execution chamber. Following a stay and remand from the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2024 on the spiritual advisor issue, the district court issued a partial declaratory judgment in Gutierrez’s favor on the DNA challenge. Gutierrez again filed a motion pursuant to Chapter 64 in state court seeking DNA testing to establish his innocence of the death penalty, which the trial court denied for lack of jurisdiction.
Meanwhile the state appealed the district court’s partial summary judgment order in his § 1983 case. The Fifth Circuit, in a split decision, reversed the district court’s judgment, holding that Gutierrez lacks standing.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari on the following issue:
In Reed v. Goertz, 598 U.S. 230, 234 (2023), this Court held that Rodney Reed has standing to pursue a declaratory judgment that Texas’s post-conviction DNA statute was unconstitutional because “Reed suffered an injury in fact,” the named defendant “caused Reed’s injury,” and if a federal court concludes that Texas’s statute violates due process, it is “substantially likely that the state prosecutor would abide by such a court order.”
In this case, a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to follow that ruling over a dissent that recognized that this case was indistinguishable from Reed. The majority formulated its own novel test for Article III standing, which requires scouring the record of the parties’ dispute and any legal arguments asserted, to predict whether the defendants in a particular case would actually redress the plaintiff’s injury by complying with a federal court’s declaratory judgment. Gutierrez v. Saenz, 93 F.4th 267, 274 (5th Cir. 2024).
The Fifth Circuit’s new test conflicts with Reed and creates a circuit split with the United States Courts of Appeals for the Eighth and Ninth Circuits, which have applied the standing doctrine exactly as this Court directed in Reed. See Johnson v. Griffin, 69 F.4th 506 (8th Cir. 2023); Redd v. Guerrero, 84 F.4th 874 (9th Cir. 2023).
The question presented is: Does Article III standing require a particularized determination of whether a specific state official will redress the plaintiff’s injury by following a favorable declaratory judgment?
The certiorari stage briefing is available on the Supreme Court's website here.