Texas executes the oldest inmate on its death row, aged 78

Texas executed Carl Buntion this Thursday, who at 78 was the oldest prisoner to face the death penalty in the state. Convicted of the 1990 murder of a Houston police officer, Buntion received the lethal injection less than a week before the scheduled execution date of Melissa Lucio, the first Latina sentenced to death in Texas, who insists on her innocence.

Buntion’s was the first execution carried out by the North American state this year. It came shortly after the United States Supreme Court rejected a last attempt of his lawyers for pausing it, according to the local newspaper ‘The Texas Tribune’, quoted by the Efe news agency.

Before his execution in the Huntsville (Texas) prison, Buntion addressed the relatives of the agent he confessed to having killed 32 years ago during a traffic stop, James Irby. “I want the Irby family to know one thing: yes i regret what i did. I pray to God that he gets comfort from the fact that I killed his father, Mrs. Irby’s husband,” he said before he died. “To all my friends who supported me all these years, I will not say goodbye, but see you later. I’m ready to go,” she added.

Buntion was sentenced to death in 1991, but his execution was delayed for decades due to lengthy legal battles over whether mental illness or disability should be taken into account. defendant’s childhood, which 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 it in a bet. In addition, her twin brother was killed by police shots.

The prisoner’s lawyers had argued this month, unsuccessfully, that his age and 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 inmates in solitary confinement, Buntion has been punished to an excessive extent“, maintained the lawyers.

Texas, pending the execution of Melissa Lucio

Buntion’s execution is the fourth so far this year in the United States, after two in Oklahoma and a third in Alabama. In addition, it comes at a time of great anticipation for Texas’ plans to administer the lethal injection next Wednesday to melissa lucio in the same prison.

Lucio, 53, became in 2008 the first Latina sentenced to death in Texas after a trial in which the Prosecutor’s Office defended that the accused had killed her daughter with a beating, while she alleges that the little girl, who had malformations in her legs, fell down the long and old staircase of her house in an oversight .

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: of the 98 carried out in 1999, in 2021 there were only 11, limited to a few southern states. 23 of the 50 states in the country have now abolished the death penalty.while another three have an active moratorium and 10 more have not carried out an execution for more than a decade, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).