WASHINGTON (CN) - Texas' strict DNA testing statute faced another Supreme Court defeat on Thursday when the justices ruled to revive a prisoner's nearly 15-year-old fight for post-conviction relief. 

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that Ruben Gutierrez had standing to test crime scene evidence that he claims will prove his innocence. Writing for the majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, said prosecutors couldn't moot Gutierrez's due process rights by promising they wouldn't hand over evidence for testing. 

"Holding otherwise would allow all manner of defendants to manufacture mootness by ensuring that, no matter what procedures a court requires the defendant to employ, the same substantive outcome will result," Sotomayor wrote. 

Intervention in death row appeals has become exceedingly rare at the Supreme Court, but Gutierrez is breaking that trend. In 2020, his execution was delayed when the justices reviewed Texas' ban on clergy accompanying inmates in the execution chamber. 

Last July, the Supreme Court granted Gutierrez an additional execution delay to hear this appeal.

Gutierrez was convicted of capital murder in what prosecutors called a robbery gone wrong. He and two others targeted 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison, who kept over $600,000 at home. The trio planned to lure Harrison out of her mobile home, but instead, two men went in and fatally stabbed her with screwdrivers. 

Gutierrez admits planning the robbery but says he never entered Harrison's home or took part in her murder. For 14 years, he's sought DNA testing to prove his innocence, but Texas' strict post-conviction testing rules have blocked him.

While Texas allows death row inmates to challenge their eligibility for execution through habeas claims, the deadline for post-conviction DNA testing expires before they can file those claims. 

Gutierrez said the law "makes the post-conviction remedy 'illusory' by extinguishing a claim before [he] and those similarly situated can even bring it." 

Gutierrez argued that Texas's DNA testing statute-Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 64-violated his due process rights by allowing testing only to prove innocence, not to challenge his eligibility for the death penalty.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett sided with their liberal colleagues to rule against hurdles to DNA testing in the Lone Star State. In 2023, the same six-justice majority ruled in favor of Rodney Reed in his challenge against a stringent chain-of-custody requirement. 

An appeals court recognized the parallels between Reed v. Goertz and Gutierrez's case, Sotomayor said, but still refused to find that Gutierrez had standing to fight for DNA testing. 

"The Fifth Circuit erred in transforming the redressability inquiry into a guess as to whether a favorable court decision will in fact ultimately cause the prosecutor to turn over the evidence," Sotomayor wrote. 

Justice Samuel Alito lamented that the majority had the "audacity to criticize" the appeals court decision, arguing that the Fifth Circuit applied the real Reed test. The George Bush appointee accused the court of assisting Gutierrez's attempt to run out the clock on his execution. 

"Today's decision...flagrantly distorts the standard that Reed articulated," Alito wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. "Indeed, the majority edits Reed's critical language in a way that would draw rebuke if done by an attorney in a brief filed in this court." 

Alito - who, with Thomas and Gorsuch, also dissented in Reed - claimed that the previous ruling turned on increasing the likelihood that prosecutors would turn over evidence for DNA testing. Alito said prosecutors were unlikely to do the same in Gutierrez's case. 

"The majority's new test makes a hash of redressability," Alito wrote. "It appears that, under this new test, the likelihood of redress is simply not relevant. That most certainly is not what Reed held." 

Criminal justice advocates praised the ruling, stating that access to courts shouldn't depend on a plaintiff's ability to demonstrate success where protected interests are concerned. 

"Procedural due process is about the right to a fair proceeding, and courts must closely attend to the nature of the asserted constitutional right in Section 1983 cases," Constitutional Accountability Center Senior Appellate Counsel Miriam Becker-Cohen said in a statement. 

Source: Courthouse News Service