Texas executed Arthur Lee Burton on Tuesday night after his lawyers failed to convince the US Supreme Court that he suffered from an intellectual disability, a last-ditch appeal that would have spared him the death penalty.
The man was convicted and eventually executed for murdering a Houston woman in 1997. He also attempted to kidnap and rape her, court records show.
Burton was given a lethal injection. He died at 6:47 p.m.
Burton, who lived in Harris County at the time of the attack, is the third person Texas has executed this year. The state has scheduled the executions of four other men on death row — three later this year and one in 2025.
In delivering his final statement, Burton thanked those who prayed for him, including those who did not know him personally.
“Bird is going home,” he said. “To all the people I hurt and caused pain, I wish we didn’t have to be here right now, but I want you to know I’m sorry I put you through this.”
“I hope I can find peace and that you can too. Director, I’m fine.”
Burton was first sentenced to death in 1998 for killing Nancy Adleman, a mother of three who was jogging on a summer afternoon in the swamp near her Houston home.
Police officers discovered her body the next morning in a wooded area near the jogging trail. Adleman was strangled with her own shoelace, her body was severely beaten and her shorts and underwear were thrown some distance away, according to court documents.
When approached by a police officer, Burton initially denied killing Adleman but later confessed to the crime and admitted to attacking a female jogger, dragging her into the woods and strangling her until she was unconscious, according to court documents. Burton has since argued that his confession was coerced.
“For every woman who has ever exercised alone, or gone out to her car alone at night, this case is their worst nightmare,” said Josh Reiss, chief of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office’s post-conviction resources division.
In a memoir published in 2019, Sarah Adleman, the victim’s daughter, explored the pain of her mother’s murder, which took place when she was a teenager, and included excerpts from her mother’s poetry.
“The morning after she didn’t come home, I found a baby sparrow in the yard, next to the birdbath, under the pine tree,” she wrote. “If I can nurse the bird back to health, my mother will be fine. I make a home for the bird in a shoebox, cut up grapes for it to eat, and leave it on my nightstand for two nights.”
In another passage, he wrote about how his mother told his killer that she forgave him and that “God does too.”
“What he did do with his words was open the door to acceptance,” she wrote. “Acceptance that life, no matter how hard we try or struggle, will always be the same. Forgiveness comes later.”
In Burton’s latest appeal, which the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Wednesday afternoon, his lawyers argued that he has an intellectual disability and is therefore ineligible for the death penalty.
In a petition filed just days before his scheduled execution, Burton presented “newly developed evidence” of his intellectual disability, including an evaluation by a clinical psychologist who found Burton meets the criteria for “mild intellectual disability,” several neuropsychological tests, school records and supportive comments from seven people who knew him as a teenager.
The state rejected Burton’s claim, citing a clinical neuropsychologist’s assessment that indicated “the qualitative and quantitative evidence is not consistent with the presence of intellectual disability.” The state’s report argued that Burton’s IQ test scores were several points above the range indicating a disability, that he appeared to have been a “very prolific reader” while on death row and that he had not required additional support to function in the prison system.
In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing a person with an intellectual disability constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.” Intellectual disability is one of two categorical restrictions the court has placed on the death penalty. People who were under 18 when they committed a capital crime also cannot be sentenced to death, the court has held.
“It’s the law of the land,” said Kate Johnson, one of Burton’s attorneys, as the lawsuit was pending in court. “Mr. Burton has an intellectual disability. The state disagrees. And our view is that we should litigate the matter and if he has an intellectual disability, he should be resentenced.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday afternoon that Burton’s petition was not timely and should have been filed years ago. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals also rejected Burton’s intellectual disability claim.
Burton’s attorneys appealed the state criminal court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court to have it reconsidered and his execution stayed. They argued that the state’s highest criminal court acted improperly and failed to follow the latest medical guidelines for evaluating intellectual disability.
“Once again, a chasm is opening up between the medical community’s diagnostic framework for intellectual disability and the TCCA’s idiosyncratic view of who should be deemed unfit for execution,” his lawyers wrote to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Mr. Burton has fallen into that chasm. Thus, once again, Texas has imposed a test that violates this Court’s precedents.”
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