A Texas man who claimed an intellectual handicap in a last-ditch plea for clemency was executed Wednesday evening for the murder of a lady who was jogging near her Houston home more than 27 years earlier.
Arthur Lee Burton, 54, was given a fatal injection at Huntsville’s state penitentiary and pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. locally. He was sentenced for the July 1997 murder and attempted rape of Nancy Adleman, a 48-year-old mother of three.
Adleman was severely assaulted and strangled with her shoelace in a thickly wooded location near a jogging track along a bayou, according to authorities. According to the investigators, Burton admitted to killing her, stating, “She asked me why I was doing it and that I didn’t have to do it.” During the trial, he recanted his confession.
After lower courts refused Burton’s plea for a stay, the United States Supreme Court denied a defense request to intervene hours before the scheduled injection.
Burton’s lawyers claimed that assessments from two experts and documents revealed Burton “exhibited low scores on tests of learning, reasoning, comprehending complex ideas, problem-solving, and suggestibility, all of which are examples of significant limitations in intellectual functioning.” They maintained that the evidence showed he had an intellectual handicap, making him “categorically exempt from the death penalty.”
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Prosecutors, on the other hand, contended that Burton had not previously claimed an intellectual handicap and had only done so eight days before his planned execution.
An expert with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which charged Burton, stated in an Aug. 1 report that there was no proof Burton had a severe impairment in intellectual or mental capacity.
“I have not seen any mental health or other notations that Mr. Burton suffers from a significant deficit in intellectual or mental capabilities,” the assessment by Thomas Guilmette, a psychology professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, stated.
In 2002, the Supreme Court outlawed the execution of mentally handicapped people. However, it has given states some leeway in determining how to identify such infirmities.
Burton was convicted in 1998, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his death sentence in 2000. In 2002, he was sentenced to death again during a fresh penalty trial.
Burton’s lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court, accusing the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals of rejecting their allegations of intellectual disability due to “hostility” toward past Supreme Court rulings criticizing the state’s methods of evaluating intellectual disability.
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In its filing with the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General’s Office denied that the state appeals court refused to use current criteria for finding intellectual impairment.
Burton was the third inmate executed this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state, and the eleventh in the United States.
Ramiro Gonzales was executed last month, on what would have been his young victim’s 41st birthday. In February, convicted murderer Ivan Cantu was executed in Huntsville despite his claims of innocence.
Taberon Dave Honie is set to become Utah’s first convict executed since 2010. He was sentenced to death for murdering his girlfriend’s mother in 1998.