Death row inmate Ruben Gutierrez was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Tuesday at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, before the Supreme Court granted a stay.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Texas Department of Criminal Justice/AP
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Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Texas Department of Criminal Justice/AP
The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday stayed the execution of Ruben Gutierrez, less than 30 minutes before the state was scheduled to carry out a death sentence by lethal injection for the 1998 killing of a retired professor. Gutierrez claims he did not kill the woman and that DNA testing of the evidence would strengthen his case.
Gutierrez has failed in multiple attempts to obtain DNA testing in his case. He has asked the Supreme Court to stay his execution and review lower court rulings on the issue, arguing that his constitutional rights are violated by Texas laws limiting how and why DNA evidence can be tested.
Here’s a quick guide to the case:
Gutierrez was convicted in 1999
Escolastica Harrison, 85, was killed in 1998 during a burglary at her home, where she kept large sums of cash. After retiring from teaching, she lived and ran a trailer park in Brownsville, Texas. Because of her aversion to banks, she had about $600,000 in the home she shared with her nephew, Avel Cuellar.
Gutierrez, now 47, learned about the cash treasure because he was friends with Cuellar and ran errands for Harrison, court records show.
Prosecutors said three men – Gutierrez, Rene Garcia and Pedro Gracia – took part in the robbery, saying it turned violent after their initial plan to distract Harrison and take the money failed.
“The evidence showed that two of the three men entered the mobile home and Harrison was stabbed to death with two screwdrivers during the burglary,” Gutierrez’s defense team said in a court filing in March. Gutierrez claims he did not enter Harrison’s trailer on the day he died.
DNA testing has been denied for over a decade
Since at least 2010, Gutierrez has requested DNA testing on several items from the crime scene, according to court documents: “(1) a blood sample taken from the victim; (2) a shirt belonging to Cuellar that had blood stains on it; (3) fingernail scrapings from the victim; (4) several blood samples from the home; and (5) a loose hair recovered from the victim’s finger.”
As the Texas Tribune reports, Gutierrez’s lawyers have suggested that 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 requests for DNA testing from Gutierrez. In 2011, the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Texas DNA testing law “does not authorize testing when the results of the exculpatory tests would affect only the sentence or punishment he received,” according to court documents.
The Court of Criminal Appeals said that since Gutierrez participated in a crime that resulted in death, he would always be He is charged with capital murder under the state’s party law. 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 one piece of evidence, hairs found around Harrison’s finger, couldn’t be tested because they were no longer in state custody. But when Gutierrez was assigned as a new attorney in 2019, they “located the loose hairs … in a sealed envelope in the district attorney’s files,” according to a court filing by his defense team.
What happens now?
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to grant Gutierrez’s request. If it does, his execution will be stayed until the justices rule on the DNA testing issue.
If the Supreme Court rejects the request, Gutierrez’s stay of execution will automatically be lifted.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied Gutierrez’s request for a stay earlier this year, saying he lacked standing and that his case was unaffected by a 2023 Supreme Court decision in a Texas case that also involved a man on death row seeking DNA testing. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court granted defendant Rodney Reed’s due process request, sending the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court.
The majority opinion of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected Gutierrez’s request, said his situation was too different from Reed’s to follow the same legal reasoning. But his defense team disagrees, arguing that Texas’ law restricting post-conviction DNA testing is unconstitutional.
Texas has scheduled four more executions later this year.
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