Gutierrez v. Saenz

In this case, the court considered this issue: Does a Texas death-row inmate have standing to sue the state over its refusal to grant access to DNA testing under a law that allows such testing only when the person can demonstrate that exculpatory results would have prevented their conviction?

The case was decided on June 26, 2025.

The Supreme Court held that Petitioner Ruben Gutierrez has standing to bring his 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claim challenging Texas’s postconviction DNA testing procedures under the Due Process Clause. Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored the majority opinion of the Court.

Prisoners convicted in state court have a liberty interest in demonstrating their innocence with new evidence under state law. When states create postconviction procedures, they can create rights to other procedures essential to realizing those rights. Under Skinner v Switzer, a prisoner may bring a § 1983 due process claim alleging that a state's DNA testing statute unconstitutionally prevents him from obtaining testing, even though he cannot directly challenge state court denials of his testing motions. To bring such a suit, the prisoner must demonstrate judicial standing to sue.

The standing analysis follows Reed v Goertz, which requires three elements. First, Gutierrez adequately alleged an injury: the prosecutor's denial of access to DNA evidence. Second, prosecutor Saenz caused this injury by refusing to release evidence in his custody for testing. Third, if a federal court declares Texas’s procedures unconstitutional, that judgment would eliminate Saenz’s justification for denying testing, thereby removing the barrier between Gutierrez and the evidence. The declaratory judgment would change the parties’ legal status and redress Gutierrez’s injury by eliminating the allegedly unlawful basis for the denial.

The Fifth Circuit erred in two fundamental ways. First, it improperly focused on the limited declaratory judgment the District Court ultimately issued rather than on Gutierrez’s broader complaint. Gutierrez’s complaint challenged not just Article 64’s limitation to actual innocence claims, but multiple barriers the statute creates—including its virtually insurmountable standard for parties to crimes, its refusal to consider new evidence, and its prohibition on testing solely to challenge death eligibility. Standing depends on the allegations in the complaint, not on the particular relief a district court later grants.

Second, the Fifth Circuit wrongly transformed the redressability inquiry into speculation about whether the prosecutor would ultimately provide the evidence. Under Reed, a declaratory judgment need only eliminate the prosecutor’s reliance on the challenged provision as a justification for denying testing. The Court rejected the notion that redressability requires certainty about the ultimate outcome. That a prosecutor might find other reasons to deny testing—just as the prosecutor in Reed had multiple grounds for denial—does not defeat standing to challenge specific reasons as unconstitutional. Courts regularly allow plaintiffs to challenge improper legal grounds for discretionary decisions even when the decision-maker might reach the same result for different reasons.