Texas is set to execute Arthur Lee Burton on Wednesday evening for the 1997 killing and attempted kidnapping and rape of a Houston woman. Burton would be the third person executed in Texas this year. Four others are scheduled to die in 2024. 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, Texas Tribune reports. 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 Burton’s latest appeal, which was still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court as of Wednesday morning, 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.
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