Texas executes Arthur Lee Burton for 1997 killing of Houston jogger

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Texas executed Arthur Lee Burton on Wednesday evening after his lawyers could not successfully convince the U.S. Supreme Court that he was intellectually disabled, a last-ditch appeal that would have rendered him ineligible for the death penalty. He was convicted, and ultimately killed, for murdering a Houston woman in 1997. He also attempted to kidnap and rape her, court records show.

Burton was administered 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 for four additional men on death row — three later this year and one in 2025.

Delivering his final statement, Burton thanked those who prayed for him, including the ones that did not know him personally.

“Bird is going home," he said. “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.”

“I hope that I find peace and y'all can too. Warden, I am good.”

Burton was first sentenced to death in 1998 for killing Nancy Adleman, a mother of three who was on a summer evening jog along the bayou near her home in Houston. 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 badly beaten and her shorts and underwear discarded some distance away, according to court documents.

When approached by a police officer, Burton initially denied killing Adleman. But he later confessed to the crime and admitted to attacking a jogger, dragging her to the woods and choking 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 who has walked 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 division of post-conviction writs.

In a memoir published in 2019, Sarah Adleman, the victim’s daughter, explored the grief of her mother’s killing — which took place while she was a teenager — and included pieces of her mother’s poetry.

“The morning after she didn’t come home I find a baby sparrow in the garden next to the birdbath, under the pine tree,” she wrote. “If I can nurse the bird back to health my mother will be OK. I make a home for the bird in a shoebox, cut grapes for it to eat, and keep it on my bedside table for two nights.”

In another passage, she wrote of how her mother told her killer that she forgives him, and “God does too.”

“What she did do with her words was open the door to acceptance,” she wrote. “Acceptance that life, no matter how hard we try or how hard we fight it, will ever be as it was. Forgiveness comes after.”

In Burton’s latest appeal, which the U.S. Supreme Court rejected on Wednesday afternoon, his lawyers argued that he is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for the death penalty.

In a petition filed just days before his scheduled execution, Burton presented “recently-developed evidence” of his intellectual disability, including an evaluation by a clinical psychologist who found that Burton meets the criteria for “mild intellectual disability,” various neuropsychological tests, school records and supporting commentary from seven people who knew him in his adolescence.

The state rejected Burton’s claim, citing a clinical neuropsychologist’s evaluation that the “qualitative and quantitative evidence are not consistent with the presence of intellectual disability.” The state’s report argued that the results of Burton’s IQ tests fell several points above the range that indicates a disability, that he appeared to have been a “very prolific reader” while on death row and that he has not required additional support to function in the prison system.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing someone with an intellectual disability constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.” Intellectual disability is one of two categorical bars the court has placed on the death penalty. Those who were under 18 at the age of a capital crime are also ineligible for the death penalty, the court has held.

“It’s the law of the land,” Kate Johnson, one of Burton’s attorneys, said while action was pending in the courts. “Mr. Burton is intellectually disabled. The state does not agree. And our view is that we should litigate the issue — and if he is intellectually disabled, he needs to be resentenced.”

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday afternoon that Burton’s petition was not timely, and should have been raised years ago. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals also rejected Burton’s intellectual disability claim.

Burton’s lawyers appealed the state criminal court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court for a second look and stay of his execution. They argued that the state’s highest criminal court acted wrongly and failed to follow the latest medical guidance for evaluating intellectual disability.

“A chasm is once again growing between the medical community’s diagnostic framework for intellectual disability and the TCCA’s idiosyncratic view about who should be deemed ineligible 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 flouts this Court’s precedents.”

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