Supreme Court Allows Texas Death Row Inmate to Sue for DNA Testing

Ruben Gutierrez insisted that the testing would prove that he was not at the scene of the murder, but lower courts said it didn’t matter.

Death row inmate Ruben Gutierrez. Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP

The Supreme Court on June 26 ruled that Texas violated the rights of a death-row inmate convicted of murder by not allowing him DNA testing that he says proves his innocence.

The decision was 6–3; Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

Justice Sonja Sotomayor issued the majority opinion, which found that a lower court had erred when it ruled that Ruben Gutierrez could not sue for DNA testing since that court said it was unlikely to overturn his death sentence.

Thomas, in his separate dissent, wrote that “this court has no business intervening in this case in the first place.”