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#Post#: 640--------------------------------------------------
~ Arthur Burton, 07Aug24, (TX) ~
By: BuzzC Date: June 1, 2024, 9:34 pm
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Man convicted in 1997 ****, killing of Houston jogger to be
executed later this year--
May 1st, 2024
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A judge on Wednesday signed off on an August execution date for
a Louisiana native convicted in the 1997 **** and murder of a
Houston jogger.
The death row inmate, Arthur Lee Burton, watched the proceeding
on a teleconferencing call from the Polunsky Unit with a pair of
prison guards flanking him. The guards had their hands on his
shoulder throughout the hearing — a show of force not typically
displayed with other death row inmates facing execution in court
proceedings of late.
Prosecutors handed Judge Ramona Franklin the execution order,
which she signed, and noted that Burton, 47, after having spent
about 26 years on death row, had exhausted his due process. His
execution is slated for Aug. 7 in Huntsville.
A jury convicted Burton in 1998 in the death of Nancy Adleman, a
mother of three, whose body Harris County deputies found near
West Road and Beltway 8 after she failed to return to her
northwest Houston home while jogging. He was sentenced to die
twice — the final time after a higher court ordered a new
punishment trial.
Burton, who lived nearby and was seen riding his bike around the
neighborhood, denied killing Adleman and alleged that police
coerced an extensive confession from him.
Joshua Reiss, chief of the Post-Convictions and Writs Division
for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, countered that
Burton confessed to the crime to law enforcement after his
arrest and during the second trial.
“For any woman who has ever exercised alone or walked to her car
alone, this case is that woman’s nightmare,” Reiss said.
An attorney for Burton, Kate Johnson, asked the judge to either
set a deadline this fall for her to attempt additional appeals
or allow for a later execution date. The judge, after stepping
off the bench for several minutes, did not grant either of her
requests. She returned and asked Burton to confirm the date, his
name and whether he consented to appearing by Zoom.
She deemed Burton competent and signed the order, setting his
execution by lethal injection into motion.
Adleman’s widower, Mark, observed the proceedings alongside his
sister. He plans to attend the execution.
“You never lose the grief, but you learn to accept it and you
learn to go on,” Adleman said.
His sister, Sharon Ostrander, reflected on what she remembers
about Adleman: her smile and her poetry. She also remembers
babysitting Adleman’s children two days before her death.
“She was murdered on a Tuesday,” Ostrander said.
Joe Ownby, a retired defense attorney who prosecuted Burton in
1998, said the case never left his mind. She was coincidentally
killed near his then-church, which shares the trail along a
bayou that Adleman jogged on that night. A memorial was built
along the trail for her.
“He just took her,” Ownby recalled.
The lawyer stood by the jury’s decision to sentence Burton to
death.
“I always thought there were crimes that were so outrageous that
they just demanded the death penalty,” Ownby said. “I have no
reservations that this person’s conviction and his sentence was
just.”
Another prosecutor handled the 2002 punishment trial after the
Court of Criminal Appeals threw out his first sentence because
of mistakes made by his original defense attorney.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice last executed a Harris
County death row inmate, Arthur Brown, in March 2023, with state
records showing that 66 inmates from the Houston area remain on
death row.
8)
#Post#: 656--------------------------------------------------
Re: ~ Arthur Burton, 07Aug24, (TX) ~
By: BuzzC Date: August 7, 2024, 7:02 pm
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Texas set to execute Arthur Lee Burton for 1997 killing of
Houston jogger--
Wednesday, August 7th, 2024
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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.
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,” said Kate Johnson, one of Burton’s
attorneys. “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.
8)
#Post#: 657--------------------------------------------------
Re: ~ Arthur Burton, 07Aug24, (TX) ~
By: BuzzC Date: August 7, 2024, 8:11 pm
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BREAKING: Texas death row inmate Arthur Lee Burton who strangled
mom jogger with her shoelaces is executed--
Wednesday, August 7th, 2024
A Texas death row inmate convicted of killing a jogger in 1997,
which he said he "couldn't help" but do, was executed Wednesday
after claiming his confession should have never been shown in
the murder trial.
Arthur Lee Burton, 54, was found guilty of killing Nancy
Adleman, 48, in Houston in July 1997. One day after she didn't
come home on a run, Texas police discovered the mother of
three's bludgeoned corpse in a 4-foot hole in a wooded area
along Brays Bayou.
According to court records, the death row inmate admitted that
he attempted to rape Nancy and then strangled her with her own
shoelaces. He later told a prison psychologist that the murder
was "just something I couldn't help." In 1998, a jury returned a
guilty verdict.
8)
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