Last night, August 7, 2024, the State of Texas executed Arthur Lee Burton. Burton was convicted of assaulting and killing Nancy Adleman, a mother of three who was jogging near her home in northwest Houston, in 1997. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Burton’s motion for a stay of execution based on evidence of his intellectual disability, which his attorneys argued should render him ineligible for the death penalty.
Burton was the third person executed by Texas this year and the 134th person convicted in Harris County to be put to death since 1982. If Harris County was its own state, it would account for the second most executions after Texas.
Shortly after midnight, Utah carried out its first execution since 2010, putting Taberon Dave Honie to death. Honie was convicted of killing Claudia Benn in 1998.
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Tonight, August 7, 2024, Texas is scheduled to execute Arthur Lee Burton. Burton was convicted of assaulting and killing Nancy Adleman, a mother of three who was jogging near her home in northwest Houston, in 1997. He was granted a new punishment hearing on direct appeal, but in 2002 he was again sentenced to death by a Harris County jury.
Burton is one of nearly 300 people sentenced to death in Harris County since 1974; 133 of these individuals—more than half of whom were Black—have been executed. This figure represents more executions than any state except Texas. Of those executed from Harris County, 32 were Black men convicted of killing a white victim, as Burton was.
Evidence of racial bias in the application of the death penalty in Harris County was part of a filing Burton submitted to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) on July 30, 2024. Altogether, Burton raised four claims: (1) his execution would violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments because he is intellectually disabled; (2) scientific evidence not reasonably available in 2003 undermines his conviction; (3) the State used “scientifically invalid and misleading testimony” at trial, violating his right to due process; and (4) the State pursued the death penalty because of his race, violating multiple state and federal constitutional protections.”
Evidence of intellectual disability
After the Texas CCA swiftly denied all four claims on August 1, Burton pursued relief from the federal courts. His motion for a stay of execution and a petition for a writ of certiorari currently are pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. In his petition, Burton argues that the Texas CCA improperly dismissed evidence of his intellectual disability, which should render him ineligible for execution.
In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the application of the death penalty for persons with intellectual disability. The Court left it to each state to set forth criteria for determining whether an individual is intellectually disabled. As a result, in 2004, the Texas CCA determined its own, nonscientific standard, known as the “Briseño factors” because of the case in which the standard was announced. In developing the Briseño factors, the court used a 1992 definition of intellectual disability as a point of departure— a standard the medical community regarded as out of date because it did not focus enough on individualized clinical evaluations.
In 2017 and again in 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Moore v. Texas that the State of Texas must use current medical standards for determining whether a person is intellectually disabled and therefore exempt from execution. The case involved Bobby James Moore, who was convicted in Houston in 1980.
The decisions in Moore v. Texas fundamentally changed the way the State assesses intellectual disability claims in capital cases. Eighteen men have been removed from death row in Texas since 2017 due to evidence of intellectual disability. One-third of these cases came from Harris County. Most of these men spent decades on death row before their sentences were changed to life in prison.
Arthur Burton’s attorneys argue that because of the Court’s rulings in Moore, he has a newly available legal basis for an Atkins claim under Texas law.
Read coverage of the case from the Associated Press.
Executions in 2024
If the execution proceeds, Burton would be the third person put to death by the State of Texas this year. Another man who was scheduled for execution, Ruben Gutierrez, received a rare stay from the U.S. Supreme Court just 20 minutes before the lethal injection process was set to begin. Gutierrez seeks DNA testing of crime scene evidence to prove he did not kill Escolastica Harrison in 1998.
To date this year, there have been 10 executions nationwide. Executions also have occurred in Alabama (three), Georgia (one), Missouri (two), and Oklahoma (two). On August 8, Utah is set to carry out its first execution since 2010, and Florida is set to carry out its first execution of the year on August 29.