A 54-year-old murderer was executed by the state of Texas for killing a female jogger 27 years ago while the woman was running near her home.
Arthur Lee Burton had claimed to have an intellectual disability in a bid to stave off his sentence, but it did not result in a stay. The state prison in Huntsville, Texas, administered a lethal injection to Burton at just before 7 pm.
Burton’s victim was Nancy Adleman, 48, who was a mother to three children. Her body was found severely beaten, and she had been strangled with one of her own shoelaces. She was discovered in the woods off a jogging trail that went through a nearby bayou.
When cops arrested Burton, he confessed to the crime. Grimly, he said Adleman kept asking him why he was doing this to her, and telling him that he did not have to kill her. The man later retracted his confession during his trial.
As is usual in death penalty cases, Burton’s lawyers filed a last-minute petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to consider the request for a stay of execution. Lower courts had already rejected the request.
The killer’s attorneys argued that Burton should have been “categorically exempt” from execution based on his alleged disability. They said that experts had evaluated their client and found that he tested very low on reasoning ability, thinking about complex ideas, solving problems, and that he was extremely suggestible. They called the results evidence of “significant limitations in intellectual functioning.”
Prosecutors disagreed, stating that the murderer had not previously claimed to be disabled, but instead waited until just a week before his death date to make the plea. An expert working for the District Attorney’s office in Harris County said he saw no evidence that Burton was mentally disabled in any way.
If he had been able to prove his status, Burton would indeed have been spared lethal injection. In 2002, the Supreme Court made executing intellectually disabled people off limits. But the court allowed states to set their own standards for what qualified as a mental disability.
