Arthur Lee Burton was executed in Texas on Wednesday for murdering Nancy Adleman, a mother of three, after apologizing to those he had affected.
“To all the people I have hurt and caused pain, I wish we didn’t have to be here at this moment, but I want you to know that I am sorry for putting y’all through this and my family,” he vented. “I’m not better than anybody. I hope I find peace, and that you will as well.
Burton was originally convicted one year after the July 1997 murder of the 48-year-old mother, who was jogging near her Houston home when she was savagely assaulted and strangled with her shoelace just off the Brays Bayou running route. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his death sentence in 2000, but it was finally reinstated two years later.
According to authorities, Burton admitted to killing and attempting to rape Adleman, stating, “She asked me why I was doing it and that I didn’t have to do it.” However, during the trial, he recanted his confession.
In his final words before being executed by lethal injection, the 54-year-old apologized and said, “I want to say thank you to all the people who support and pray for me.”
“For those of you I know and do not know, thank you for your support and prayers.”
“Bird is going home,” he added.
The 54-year-old is the third person executed in Texas this year, and the eleventh in the United States.
As of 2011, death row convicts in Texas are not allowed to request a final supper, therefore Burton had to choose from the same menu as all other inmates in the Huntsville state jail before receiving the lethal injection.
Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist murdered in 2011 for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., prompted the shift in final meals. A lawmaker had complained about him ordering a tremendous amount of food, including two chicken-fried steaks, three fajitas, and a pint of ice cream, before stating he wasn’t hungry after his last dish was brought.
Burton admitted in his written confession that he was riding his bike down the bayou when he noticed Adleman jogging. He tossed down his bike before charging up behind her and dragged her into the forest. After choking her with his hands, he tried to rape the semi-conscious woman but stated he was “so nervous” that he “couldn’t do it.”
He claimed she begged him to let her go, saying, “‘I forgive you.'” He said, “She told me to leave. She asked me why I was doing it, that I didn’t have to, and that I was a gorgeous man.
He claimed he attempted to flee, but to quell her screaming, the then-27-year-old choked her again until they both “fell in a hole.” When he saw another person on the route, he went back to her and strangled her with one of her shoelaces.
Sarah, Adleman’s daughter, revealed in her 2019 novel The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother’s Echoes that she wrote a letter to her mother’s murderer after he was sentenced to death.
Sarah told The Independent on Wednesday that she wrote to Burton, hoping for answers and knowledge that he could only provide while he was still alive. In her note, she stated that she “hoped he was at peace, and that it’s available for everybody.”
“I mostly wanted to know that he received my words that I had said, and so I requested a response back,” Sarah told me. “He replied, and I still haven’t opened the letter. It’s something I struggle with; it’s filed in my file cabinets under the heading ‘Life.'”
Sarah, 43, a yoga therapist who works with traumatic brain injury survivors in the Denver area, said she would not attend the execution with her father and one of her two brothers, instead holding a “gratitude and forgiveness ceremony” at a local river with her son and their family friends.
“In thinking about what my mom would want, she always said to choose joy,” Sarah told The Independent. Burton’s execution occurred after his lawyers failed to demonstrate that he “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.”
According to the petition, Burton scored “significantly below” grade level on standardized testing and struggled with daily duties such as cooking and cleaning, based on a study by two experts and an examination of data, and thus might have been spared from the death sentence.
Prosecutors claimed Burton had not previously raised these arguments and only did so eight days before his scheduled execution.
In a brief with the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General’s Office denied that the state appeals court refused to use current criteria for establishing intellectual disability. His plea was denied just hours before he was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. local time.