“God is great!” were the words spoken by Ruben Gutierrez, who was already set for execution after being convicted of capital murder in the 1998 stabbing death of Escolastica Harrison. The U.S. Supreme Court granted the stay 20 minutes before the lethal injection.
Ruben Gutierrez, 47, was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday, July 16, at the Huntsville Correctional Facility in Texas. Hours before the execution, the inmate was with his wife, Angela Gutierrez, a spiritual advisor and his attorney until he was taken to a holding cell.
25 years on death row
But 20 minutes before he was taken to the nearby execution chamber, the prison warden told Gutierrez that the Fifth Circuit Supreme Court had granted him a stay of execution after 25 years on death row.
“God is great! I did not expect this,” Gutiérrez said when informed of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Uncommon measure
Granting last-minute pardons to death row inmates has been a rare move by the Supreme Court, and most justices have expressed skepticism and even hostility to such requests, The Associated Press reported.
Escolastica Harrison’s family did not want to make any statements after learning of the Court’s ruling, since in 2020, Gutiérrez received a similar suspension at the last minute.
What happened?
The case dates back to 1998, when Rubén Gutiérrez, who was 21 years old, along with René García and Pedro Gazca, entered the home office of Escolastica Harrison, an 85-year-old Hispanic woman, with the intention of robbing her of the money she kept in a safe.
The victim was repeatedly beaten and stabbed several times in the head, resulting in his death. Gutierrez and his two co-defendants fled the scene with $56,000, according to the jail record. In 1999, a jury found Ruben Gutierrez guilty of murder and sentenced him to death.
They tried to prove that he didn’t kill her.
For 10 years, Gutierrez has been requesting DNA tests that would help him prove that he had no role in the woman’s death. His lawyers have repeatedly shown that there is no physical or forensic evidence linking him to the murder of the elderly woman.
None of the arguments put forward by his lawyers worked, as there was a confession in which he admitted to planning the robbery, AP reported.
Gutierrez was convicted under Texas’ parties law, which says a person can be held liable for the actions of others if they aid or encourage the commission of a crime.
“The fact that the court has stepped in and stopped this execution will give us the opportunity to try to convince other state actors to allow us to conduct the tests that we have been asking for all along,” Shawn Nolan, Gutierrez’s attorney, told the AP.
Attorney Nolan said such delays in executions by the Supreme Court are rare.
They believe that Gutierrez is innocent
A group of activists from the “Abolition of the death penalty” movement were present outside the prison to try to prevent Rubén from being executed, since they consider him innocent.
Gloria Raubac, “many times innocent people are executed, but the majority of people on death row are people of color, African Americans, Latinos,” the woman who traveled from Houston told Telemundo.
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