Supreme Court to consider death row plea for DNA testing.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Feb. 24 in the case of a man on Texas death row who has long tried to obtain postconviction DNA testing on evidence that he says would exonerate him. Ruben Gutierrez was sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison in Brownsville, Tex. Gutierrez has maintained his innocence and says DNA from several pieces of evidence — such as a hair and nail scrapings from Harrison’s finger and blood stains — would show that he was never in Harrison’s home. And if the DNA evidence shows that he never entered Harrison’s home, he contends, the jury would not have sentenced him to death.