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Ruben Gutierrez has been fighting to stop his death by requesting DNA testing he claims could prove his innocence in the brutal killing of an elderly woman in Brownsville. But it was a clerical error that prompted the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Tuesday to halt his Oct. 30 execution.
The state’s highest criminal court issued a stay after Gutierrez’s attorneys argued his death warrant didn’t have the proper seal from the court when it was delivered to the sheriff and an attorney, invalidating it.
. . . A large focus of Gutierrez’s appeals has been on DNA testing. At the time of Harrison’s death, police preserved fingernail scrapings, a hair in her hand and blood stains, but DNA was never tested. Gutierrez has fought for a decade to get the evidence tested, claiming it can prove he was not Harrison’s killer. Cameron County prosecutors have argued that because there may have been multiple killers, tested evidence that didn't match him still wouldn’t mark him as innocent.
So far, the courts have rejected such testing. A new filing on the matter is pending at the Court of Criminal Appeals, but the court stopped Gutierrez’s execution on a technical question instead.
When the convicting court sets an execution date, Texas law states that the district clerk must issue an execution warrant “under the seal of the court” within 10 days to the county sheriff, who then delivers it to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The court must also send copies of the warrant to the attorneys in the case and the state’s Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, a state public defender office.
The warrant sent to the public defender office and the sheriff did not have the seal on it, and was sent 12 days after the execution was set, according to the court briefings. County prosecutors said it is wrong to stop Gutierrez’s execution for the clerical errors because the importance of the law is that notice is given fairly to all parties.
