Washington DC - The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted a temporary halt to the execution of a man convicted of murder shortly before he was set to be given a lethal injection in Texas.

Ruben Gutierrez was sentenced to death for taking part in the 1998 killing of Escolastica Harrison, an elderly manager of a mobile home park in the city of Brownsville, which borders Mexico.

He and two other men were accused of planning to rob Harrison, who kept some $600,000 at home out of a distrust of banks, according to court documents, before beating and stabbing her to death.

Of his two co-defendants, one pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence, while the other is still on the run.

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Gutierrez, who is now 47, maintains he is innocent, and for over ten years has been demanding that DNA samples collected at the scene be analyzed.

He insists that he did not enter the mobile home, and that he was unaware the other two intended to kill Harrison.

Gutierrez's lawyers have argued that there was no physical evidence of his presence at the crime scene, and that he only confessed when police threatened to arrest his wife and place his children in foster care.

After his final appeal was rejected in lower courts, Gutierrez appealed to the US Supreme Court, which granted a temporary halt Tuesday while it considers whether to take up the case.

The Supreme Court's order said if it ultimately decided not to hear the case, its stay of the execution would "terminate automatically."

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It's not the first time the Supreme Court has granted Gutierrez a last-minute reprieve. In 2020 the court halted his execution after Texas authorities denied his request to have a priest present in the death chamber.

"We are hopeful that now the court has stepped in to stop this execution, we can ultimately accomplish the DNA testing to prove that Mr. Gutierrez should not be executed now or in the future," attorney Shawn Nolan said in a statement.