HOUSTON — A Texas man described by his lawyers as mentally disabled faced the death penalty Wednesday for strangling and attempting to rape a woman as she went jogging near her Houston home more than 27 years ago.
Arthur Lee Burton was convicted of murdering Nancy Adleman in July 1997. The 48-year-old mother of three was beaten and strangled with her own shoelace in a heavily wooded area off a jogging path along a bayou, police said. Authorities said Burton confessed to killing Adleman, saying, “She asked me why I did it and that I didn’t have to do it.” Burton recanted the confession during the trial.
Burton, now 54, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state prison in Huntsville.
Lower courts denied his request for a stay, so his lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt his execution.
His lawyers argued that reports from two experts and a review of the records showed that Burton “had low scores on tests of learning, reasoning, understanding complex ideas, problem solving, and suggestibility, all of which are examples of significant impairments in intellectual functioning.”
The documents show that Burton scored “significantly lower” than his classmates on standardized tests and struggled with daily activities such as cooking and cleaning, the petition said.
“This court’s intervention is urgently needed to prevent the imminent execution of Mr. Burton, who is strongly supported by uncontested evidence that he is mentally retarded and therefore categorically exempt from the death penalty,” Burton’s attorneys wrote.
The Supreme Court in 2002 banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, but has given states some discretion in determining how to establish such disabilities. Judges have wrestled with how much discretion to grant.
Prosecutors said Burton had never previously claimed he had an intellectual disability and 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 in an Aug. 1 report that Burton’s writing and reading skills “generally equal or exceed those of the average American citizen, which is inconsistent with” an intellectual disability.
“I have not seen any mental health or other records that indicate that Mr. Burton suffers from any significant intellectual or mental capacity deficit,” said the report by Thomas Guilmette, a psychology professor at Providence College in Rhode Island.
Burton was convicted in 1998, but his death sentence was overturned by the Texas Court of Appeals in 2000. He was sentenced to death again in a new criminal trial in 2002.
In their petition to the Supreme Court, Burton’s attorneys accused the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals of rejecting their intellectual disability claims because of “hostility” to previous Supreme Court rulings criticizing the state’s rules for determining intellectual disability.
In a February 2019 ruling on another death row inmate, the Supreme Court said The Texas Court of Appeals continued to rely on factors that had no basis in prevailing medical practice.
In July Consensual order In rejecting a claim of intellectual disability for another death row inmate, four Texas appeals court judges suggested that the standards now used by clinicians and researchers “could also be the result of anti-death penalty bias on the part of those who dictate intellectual disability standards.”
In a filing with the Supreme Court, the Texas attorney general’s office denied that the state appeals court refused to adhere to the current criteria for determining intellectual disability.
Burton would be the third inmate to be put to death this year in Texas, the state with the most death sentences in the country, and the 11th in the U.S.
On Thursday, Taberon Dave Honie would be the first inmate executed in Utah since 2010. He was convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s mother in 1998.
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