A Texas man who claimed to have an intellectual disability in a late bid for clemency was executed Wednesday evening for killing a woman who was jogging near her Houston home over 27 years ago.
Arthur Lee Burton, 54, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville and was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. local time. He was convicted for the July 1997 murder and attempted rape of Nancy Adleman, a 48-year-old mother of three.
Adleman was brutally beaten and strangled with her shoelace in a wooded area off a jogging trail along a bayou, police said. Authorities reported that Burton confessed to the killing, saying, “she asked me why was I doing it and that I didn’t have to do it.” He later recanted this confession at his trial.
Hours before the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene after lower courts rejected Burton’s request for a stay. Burton’s lawyers argued that reports from two experts and his records showed he had significant limitations in intellectual functioning, including low scores on tests of learning, reasoning, and problem-solving. They claimed this was strong evidence of an intellectual disability that should exempt him from the death penalty.
Prosecutors countered that Burton had not previously raised claims of an intellectual disability and had waited until eight days before his scheduled execution to do so. An expert for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Burton, said he found no evidence of significant intellectual or mental deficits in Burton.
In 2002, the Supreme Court barred the execution of intellectually disabled people but allowed states some discretion in determining such disabilities.
Burton was initially convicted in 1998, but his death sentence was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2000. He received another death sentence in a new trial in 2002.
In their petition to the Supreme Court, Burton’s lawyers accused the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals of rejecting their claims due to “hostility” towards prior Supreme Court rulings on intellectual disability criteria. The Texas Attorney General’s Office denied this in its filing.
Burton was the third inmate executed this year in Texas, the state with the most executions, and the 11th in the U.S. Last month, Ramiro Gonzales was executed on what would have been his teenage victim’s 41st birthday. In February, Ivan Cantu was executed despite claims of innocence.
On Thursday, Taberon Dave Honie is scheduled to be the first inmate executed in Utah since 2010, for the 1998 killing of his girlfriend’s mother.