Buntion killed a police officer in 1990.
The state of Texas has executed Carl Buntionthat of their 78 years He is the oldest inmate facing the death penalty in the state, having been convicted of murder in 1990 by a Houston police officer.
Buntion received the lethal injection less than a week before the scheduled execution of Melissa Lucio, the first Latina to be sentenced to death in Texas, claiming her innocence.
Buntion was the first execution this year in Texas. and it came shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the last attempt by its lawyers to stop it, local newspaper The Texas Tribune reported.
In the last photo, at age 78, and when he was arrested for the murder of a police officer. Photo: AFP
Before he was hanged in the Huntsville (Texas) jail, the prisoner confronted police relatives who he admitted he had killed 32 years ago during a traffic stop, James Irby.
“I want the Irby family to know something: Yes I regret what I did. I pray to God that (the family) will take comfort from the fact that I killed their father, Mrs Irby’s husband, ”Buntion said.
Before being hanged, Buntion apologized to the victim’s family. Photo: AP
“To all my friends who have supported me all these years, I won’t say goodbye, but we’ll meet later. I’m ready to leave “He added.
Buntion was sentenced to death in 1991, but his execution was delayed by decades due to lengthy legal battles over whether jurors as examined him should consider elements such as the defendant’s mental illness or childhood. .
Buntion’s childhood was very difficult: his father broke his bones, he broke his mother’s tooth, he killed a man in front of his brother and left the family homeless after beating the house at a stake; and his twin brother was killed by the Police.
Buntion killed James Irby in 1990.
Buntion’s lawyers unsuccessfully argued this month that the inmate’s age and decades of good behavior on death row should free him from the death penalty.
“After living under the death sentence for more than three decades in a state that keeps its death row inmates in solitary confinement, Buntion was punished to an extreme degree,” attorneys David Dow and Jeff wrote. Newberry. .
His execution was the fourth this year in the United States, then two registered in Oklahoma and one in Alabama; and it comes at a time of increased anticipation of Texas plans to give Lucio a lethal injection next Wednesday in the same prison.
Lucio, 53, became the first Latina to be sentenced to death in Texas in 2008 after a trial in which the Prosecutor’s Office argued that the defendant killed his daughter by beating, as he says the girl, with malformations in his legs, he. fell down the long old staircase of his house in a moment of carelessness.
Over the past decade, public opinion in the United States has shunned the death penalty, sentences have dropped and there have been executions: from 98 in 1999 to just 11 in 2021, limited to a few from the southern states.
Twenty -three of the 50 states have now abolished the death penalty in their territory, while three more have an active moratorium and ten more have not carried out executions in more than a decade, according to the independent Death Penalty Information Center. (DPIC. ).
Source: Clarin