For the past thirteen years, Ruben Gutierrez, a person in Texas prison who has been sentenced to death, has sought DNA testing of crime scene evidence, which he claims will prove him ineligible for the death penalty. Texas courts have repeatedly denied his requests under Texas’s post-conviction DNA statute, which allows for DNA testing only when such testing could prove innocence of the crime itself, as opposed to a reduction in punishment to a non-capital sentence. 

In 2019, Gutierrez filed a federal lawsuit pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (“Section 1983”), a landmark Reconstruction-era statute that creates a federal remedy for deprivations of people’s constitutional rights by state actors. Among other things, Gutierrez alleged that Texas’s post-conviction DNA-testing statute transgresses principles of fundamental fairness in violation of his right to procedural due process.  

The United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas agreed and issued a declaratory judgment in Gutierrez’s favor, but a divided panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed. The panel majority held that Gutierrez lacked standing to pursue his procedural due process claim because he had not demonstrated that a federal judgment in his favor would in fact result in the state prosecutor ordering the ultimate relief—DNA testing—that Gutierrez sought in state proceedings. Gutierrez asked the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s decision, and the Court agreed to do so. 

CAC filed an amicus brief in support of Gutierrez explaining that the redressability test adopted by the Fifth Circuit is at odds with the text and history of Section 1983.  

Our brief begins by laying out that critical text and history. We explain that the Forty-Second Congress passed Section 1983 in the wake of the Civil War in response to rampant deprivations of the constitutional rights of Black Americans, Unionists, and their allies across the South. Congress was especially concerned about rampant corruption in state criminal justice systems—including ineffective or biased local prosecutors and state courts that failed to administer justice fairly and impartially. Because state criminal justice systems could not be trusted to protect and enforce federal constitutional rights or, worse, were actively engaged in the deprivation of those rights themselves, Section 1983 established the federal government as the chief protector of the basic “rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution” against officials acting “under color of [state law].”  

Our brief then explains that the redressability test adopted by the court below is fundamentally at odds with this text and history for two reasons. First, the Fifth Circuit incorrectly treated Gutierrez’s case as vindicating a state right (to DNA testing), not a federal constitutional right (the right to procedural due process). That approach cannot be squared with Section 1983’s creation of a uniquely federal remedy for incursions on rights secured by the Constitution. And by failing to closely attend to the nature of the constitutional right at stake, as Supreme Court precedent requires, the court below also failed to recognize that a plaintiff has standing to pursue a procedural due process claim even if the defendant might well come to the same decision under a constitutionally sound procedure. 

Second, our brief explains that the court below erroneously ceded the question of Article III standing—a purely federal question—to state actors. Wrong under any circumstances, that approach is especially troubling when considered against the history of Section 1983 as a remedy against state actors who had made a habit of avowing to defy federal law and were kept in office year after year by the state electorate as a reward for doing so. Under the rule of the court below, such avowals of disregard for the supremacy of federal law effectively insulate state actors from suits for deprivations of federal rights. With a simple public statement or the stroke of a pen, state defendants could absolve federal courts of their jurisdiction in cases alleging grave violations of constitutional rights by those very state officials—the types of suits that the drafters of Section 1983 viewed as core to fulfilling the promise of the Reconstruction amendments.