A Texas man who claimed intellectual disability in a late bid for a stay of execution was executed Wednesday night for the killing of a woman jogging near his Houston home more than 27 years ago.
Arthur Lee Burton, 54, was given a lethal injection at Huntsville State Penitentiary and pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. local time. He was convicted of the murder and attempted rape of Nancy Adleman, a 48-year-old mother of three, in July 1997.
Police said Adleman was brutally beaten and strangled with her own shoelace in a heavily wooded area near a jogging trail along a bayou. Authorities said Burton confessed to killing her, saying she “asked me why I was doing it and that I didn’t have to do it.” He recanted his confession at trial.
Hours before the scheduled injection, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a defense request to intervene after lower courts had previously rejected Burton’s request for a stay.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP
Burton’s attorneys argued that reports from two experts and records showed that Burton “performed poorly on tests of learning, reasoning, comprehension of complex ideas, problem solving and suggestibility, all examples of significant limitations in intellectual functioning.” They argued that the evidence was a strong indication of an intellectual disability that made him “categorically exempt from the death penalty.”
Prosecutors, however, argued that Burton had not previously claimed intellectual disability and waited until eight days before his execution to do so.
An expert from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Burton, said in an Aug. 1 report that he had seen no evidence that Burton suffered from a significant impairment in his intellectual or mental abilities.
“I have seen no mental health or other notation indicating that Mr. Burton suffers from a significant deficit in intellectual or mental capacity,” said the report by Thomas Guilmette, a psychology professor at Providence College in Rhode Island.
In 2002, the Supreme Court banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. However, it gave states some latitude in determining how to determine such disabilities.
Burton was convicted in 1998, but his death sentence was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2000. He was sentenced to death again in a retrial in 2002.
In their petition to the Supreme Court, Burton’s attorneys accused the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals of rejecting their intellectual disability claims because of “hostility” toward previous Supreme Court decisions that criticized the state’s rules on determining intellectual disability.
In its filing with the Supreme Court, the Texas attorney general’s office denied that the state appeals court refused to adhere to the current criteria for determining intellectual disability.
Burton was the third inmate killed this year in Texasthe state with the highest death penalty in the United States and the 11th in the United States
Last month, Ramiro Gonzales was executed on the day his teenage victim would have turned 41. In February, a convicted murderer Ivan Cantou was put to death in Huntsville despite his claims of innocence.
On Thursday, Taberon Dave Honie is scheduled to become the first inmate to be executed in Utah since 2010. He was convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s mother in 1998.
