(Houston) Texas is set to execute its oldest death row inmate on Thursday, Carl Buntion, 78, convicted of killing a police officer more than 30 years ago but who, opponents of capital punishment argue, no longer represents a danger to society.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
His attorneys filed a final appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. If their request is rejected, the septuagenarian will be put to death by lethal injection after 6 p.m. local time.
His defenders do not seek to prove his innocence. But in this large conservative Southern state, the most executed in the United States, a person can only be sentenced to death if a jury finds that he poses a future danger to others.
However, Carl Buntion, who suffers in particular from osteoarthritis, dizziness, hepatitis and cirrhosis, “can no longer be dangerous”, pleaded his lawyers in an appeal, since rejected, with the commission of pardons and releases Texas conditionals.
photo via Associated Press
Carl Wayne Buntion
“Last Wednesday prison officials took Carl Buntion to hospital where he complained of chest pain. He was diagnosed with pneumonia. On the way back to death row, the van suddenly stopped and Carl suffered a head injury,” tweeted Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun known for her fight against capital punishment.
In June 1990, this man, raised by an alcoholic and violent father, had already been convicted 13 times and was on parole for a sexual assault on a child.
During an intervention for a common traffic violation in Houston, Carl Buntion had shot and killed policeman James Irby.
Sentenced to the death penalty, he had seen this verdict overturned in 2009 by the highest Texas court, which had considered that the defense had not been able to be properly heard by the jurors.
But in 2012, he was again sentenced to death.
Carl Buntion has been isolated in his cell 23 hours a day for 20 years.
Last year, the US Supreme Court refused to reverse his conviction, but the progressive judge Stephen Breyer considered that the duration of his confinement called into question the constitutionality of the death penalty.