Supreme Court to weigh a Texas death row case after halting execution

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of a Texas man on death row who has long argued that DNA testing would help prove he didn’t kill an 85-year-old woman during a home robbery decades ago. The order came down Friday in the case of Ruben Gutierrez, months after the justices stayed his execution 20 minutes before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection. Gutierrez was condemned for the 1998 stabbing of Escolastica Harrison. His attorneys have said there’s no physical or forensic evidence connecting him to the killing. Prosecutors say the request for DNA testing is a delay tactic and that Gutierrez’s conviction rests on other evidence.