Attorneys for a death row prisoner set to die Tuesday evening have asked Gov. Greg Abbott and the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that COVID-19 has made it unsafe for his family to attend his execution and asking for the testing of DNA evidence that they say could exonerate him.
Ruben Gutierrez, 43, has for years claimed he is innocent of the 1998 robbery and murder of Escolastica Harrison, who had roughly $600,000 in cash stashed inside her Brownsville trailer home at the time of her death.
Gutierrez at one point admitted to being with two other accomplices during the robbery, but maintains he was not the person who killed Harrison. He has for years called for the testing of DNA that he says could exonerate him of the killing.
He was initially set to die in 2018, but has since won multiple stays of execution, including one last week that was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday.
Now, his attorneys want Abbott to grant a 30-day reprieve in the case to allow for the tests.
“We’ve been asking for this testing for years,” attorney Shawn Nolan said. “If this case (happened) today, they would just test it. So it doesn’t make sense that they keep saying no.”
Nolan also argues that coronavirus — which has spread particularly fast in Texas prisons — has created conditions that “deprived” Gutierrez of proper access to counsel and other rights. He also says it would be dangerous for Gutierrez’s family and others to travel to the Huntsville prison that houses the state’s execution chamber because of its “high rates” of coronavirus.
The Monday appeal came the same day that state Catholic leaders asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in Gutierrez's case. The group's filing challenged the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s 2019 decision to bar clergy from being with death row prisoners in the execution chamber.
TDCJ announced the rules after the U.S. Supreme Court granted a last-minute stay to Patrick Murphy, a Buddhist who had been denied access to a spiritual adviser in the execution chamber.
“As this court has repeatedly held, governmental discrimination against religion — in particular, discrimination against religious persons, religious organizations and religious speech — violates the Constitution,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote at the time. “The choice of remedy going forward is up to the state. What the state may not do, in my view, is allow Christian or Muslim inmates but not Buddhist inmates to have a religious adviser of their religion in the execution room.”
Catholic leaders again challenged the state Department of Criminal Justice rule on Monday.
“TDCJ is not merely making Gutierrez’s religious practice more difficult,” the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in their filing. “It is placing a direct, irrevocable prohibition on his sincere religious exercise, and at the most critical time for such exercise—when the soul is departing this world for the next.”
Nolan said Gutierrez has been a Catholic since his childhood, and called the ban on clergy “outrageous.”
Source: houstonchronicle.com, Robert Downen, June 15, 2020
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