Death Penalty, Nuclear Waste and More: Supreme Court Rounds Out Coming Term

Three cases all stem from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, which often finds itself to the right of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court on Friday added more than a dozen cases to the docket for its new term, which begins next week.

Among the cases: a death row prisoner seeking DNA testing of evidence he claims would exonerate him, a dispute about whether a federal agency exceeded its bounds by licensing a private entity to store spent nuclear fuel, and a legal fight over when courts should begin to consider the reasonableness of an officer’s use of force during a deadly shooting.

The three cases all stem from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, which often finds itself to the right of the Supreme Court.

DNA Testing and the Death Penalty

The Supreme Court agreed to hear a death penalty case challenging the denial of DNA testing to a man who claims that such a test would prove his innocence in the 1998 murder of a Texas woman.

The man, Ruben Gutierrez, asked the court to take his case after a divided panel of the Fifth Circuit rejected his appeal, clearing the way for his execution.

The justices halted his execution in July, just minutes before he was scheduled to be killed.

The case centers on whether a prisoner can bring a constitutional challenge against a state DNA statute that could limit access to potentially exonerating evidence.

Mr. Gutierrez was convicted in 1999 in the killing of 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison during a home robbery in Brownsville, Texas, near the Mexican border.

Mr. Gutierrez, along with two others, was accused in the killing. He claimed that he was not in the house when Ms. Harrison was murdered and that he was not aware of any plan to kill her. He has long sought DNA testing of evidence from the crime scene, including fingernail scrapings, a bloodstained shirt and a loose hair found on one of Ms. Harrison’s fingers.

Prosecutors had pushed back against testing, saying it would not definitively clear Mr. Gutierrez. They also pointed to a doctrine in Texas, known as the law of parties, which allows them to hold people involved in a crime liable, even if those people did not directly participate in the killing. That made Mr. Gutierrez eligible for the death penalty even if he had only helped plan the scheme, they added.

Lawyers for Mr. Gutierrez argued that he did not orchestrate the robbery and challenged the Texas law that imposes sharp limits on when a defendant can have access to DNA testing after a conviction.

Nuclear Waste

The Supreme Court also agreed to decide whether a federal agency was authorized by Congress to license a private entity to store spent nuclear fuel in Texas.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruled last year that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission lacked authority to grant licenses for the temporary off-site storage of the nuclear waste. The Fifth Circuit held that a federal law “plainly contemplates that, until there’s a permanent repository, spent nuclear fuel is to be stored on-site at-the-reactor or in a federal facility.”

The full Fifth Circuit declined to rehear the case by a 9-to-7 vote. A dissenting judge wrote that the panel’s decision “has grave consequences for regulated entities’ settled expectations and careful investments in costly, time-consuming agency proceedings.”

In urging the Supreme Court to intervene, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar noted that two other appeals courts had come to the opposite conclusion from that of the Fifth Circuit panel, ruling that federal law “authorizes the commission to license temporary off-site storage of spent nuclear fuel.”

“In reaching a contrary conclusion,” she added, “the Fifth Circuit disturbed the commission’s authority to safely regulate nuclear materials by issuing such licenses — an authority that the commission has exercised for more than 40 years.”

In response, Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, wrote that federal law only permits nuclear waste to be stored at a proposed but stalled facility in Yucca Mountain, Nev. “Congress has never revised its directive that Yucca Mountain is the appropriate repository for the nation’s nuclear waste,” Mr. Paxton wrote.

In a separate ruling in March, the Fifth Circuit also blocked a plan to store nuclear waste in New Mexico. Ms. Prelogar said the logic of the Texas ruling could block other efforts, too.

“Seven private licensed off-site storage sites are currently located at decommissioned nuclear facilities,” she wrote. “The Fifth Circuit’s decision casts doubt on the commission’s ability to renew such licenses because those facilities are no longer at the site of a nuclear reactor.”

Use of Force in Deadly Shootings

The Supreme Court also said it would take on a case to clarify when courts should begin to assess whether an officer acted with reasonable force.

A three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit determined this year that a police officer in Texas reasonably feared for his life when he fatally shot a driver during a 2016 traffic stop in Houston in 2016.

The panel found that Officer Roberto Felix Jr. had acted within the bounds of the Fourth Amendment’s “moment of threat” doctrine when he killed Ashtian Barnes, 24.

In its ruling, the panel wrote that under the doctrine, the court must ask whether an officer “was in danger ‘at the moment of the threat’ that caused him to use deadly force.” The actions of the officer preceding that moment were not relevant, it added.

One of the judges, a Reagan appointee, in a concurrence expressed frustration with the test established by the appeals court and urged the Supreme Court to intervene.

“A routine traffic stop has again ended in the death of an unarmed Black man, and again we cloak a police officer with qualified immunity, shielding his liability,” wrote Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham.

He added: “To these eyes, blinding an officer’s role in bringing about the ‘threat’ precipitating the use of deadly force lessens the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the American public, devalues human life and ‘frustrates the interest of the individual, and of society, in judicial determination of guilt and punishment.’”

Had he been allowed to consider the full scope of the officer’s actions that day, Judge Higginbotham added, he would have found that the officer had violated the victim’s Fourth Amendment rights.

On the afternoon of April 28, 2016, Mr. Barnes was driving a rental car on a highway outside of Houston. The car had several unpaid toll violations.

Officer Felix, a toll road deputy, spotted the car and turned on his patrol car lights. Although Mr. Barnes stopped the car and opened the trunk, he then began to pull away. Officer Felix pointed his weapon at Mr. Barnes and yelled at him as the car began to move, then stepped onto the car’s running board, weapon drawn and fired into the vehicle, killing Mr. Barnes, according to dash cam footage.

Mr. Barnes’s mother, Janice Hughes Barnes, sued on her son’s behalf, claiming that the officer’s lethal use of force against her son was unreasonable and violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

A federal trial court found that, under Fifth Circuit precedent, the officer’s use of force had been objectively reasonable, prompting Ms. Barnes to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.