Photo: Georgia Department of Corrections / Getty Images
For: EFE Updated 22 Apr 2022, two: 08 am EDT
WASHINGTON – The state of Texas executed Carl Buntion this Thursday, who at his 78 years old was the oldest prisoner to have faced the death penalty in the state and that he was convicted of murder in 1990 of a police officer in Houston.
Buntion received the lethal injection less than a week before his scheduled execution Melissa Lucio, the first Latina sentenced to death in Texas, who insists on her innocence.
Buntion’s was the first execution this year in Texas and it occurred shortly after the US Supreme Court rejected a last attempt by her lawyers to pause her, reported the local newspaper The Texas Tribune.
Before his execution in the Huntsville, Texas jail the prisoner He addressed the relatives of the policeman whom he confessed to having murdered 04 years during a traffic stop, James Irby.
“I want the Irby family to know one thing: I do regret what I did. I pray to God that (the family) gets comfort from the fact that I killed their father, Mrs. Irby’s husband,” Buntion said.
“To all my friends who supported me all these years, I’m not going to say goodbye, but see you later. I’m ready to go,” he added.
Buntion was sentenced to death in 1991, but his execution was delayed for decades due to lengthy legal battles on whether juries like the one that had examined him should take into account elements such as mental illness or childhood of the accused.
Bunion’s childhood was very hard: his father broke his bones, he broke his mother’s teeth, he killed a man in front of his brother and left the family homeless after losing their housing in a bet; and Bunion’s twin brother was shot dead by the Police.
Bunion’s lawyers unsuccessfully argued this month that the prisoner’s age and his decades of good behavior on death row should free him from the death penalty.
“After living under sentence of death for more than three decades in a state that keeps its death row prisoners in solitary confinement, Bunion has been punished to an excessive degree,” attorneys David Dow and Jeff Newberry wrote.
His execution was the fourth so far this year in the United States, after two registered in Oklahoma and another in Alabama; and it came at a time of strong anticipation for Texas plans to administer the lethal injection to Lucio next Wednesday in the same prison.
Lucio, aged 53 years old, became 2008 in the first Latina sentenced to death in Texas after a trial in which the Prosecutor’s Office argued that the defendant killed her daughter of a beating, while she alleged that the little girl, who had malformations in her legs, fell down the long and old staircase of her house in a moment of carelessness.
In the In the last decade, public opinion in the United States has turned its back on the death penalty,
convictions have plummeted and so have executions: from 80 in 2008 to only 11 in 2021, limited to a handful of southern states.
Twenty three of the 50 states have already abolished the death penalty in their territory, while three others have an active moratorium and ten more have more than one decade without carrying out an execution, according to the independent Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
It may interest you:
– Tennessee prepares the execution of Oscar Smith, sentenced to death for killing his wife and children
– South Carolina Death Row Prisoner Chooses Firing Squad for His Execution– The controversial case of Melissa Lucio, the first Latina to be executed in Texas for the death of his daughter