AFP PHOTO / Harris County District Attorney Carl Wayne Buntion is Texas’ oldest death row inmate. He is scheduled to be executed on April 21 for killing a police officer more than 30 years ago.
UNITED STATES – At 78, Carl Buntion is Texas’ oldest death row inmate. Found guilty of murdering a police officer more than 30 years ago, he is scheduled to be executed on April 21 but has appealed to the state Parolees and Parole Board to have his death sentence commuted to life without parole. The commission is due to make its decision on Tuesday, two days before the date of the execution.
In June 1990, Carl Buntion, raised by an alcoholic and violent father, had already been convicted of sexually assaulting a child 13 times and was on probation. On an operation after a traffic violation in Houston, he shoots and kills police officer James Irby.
First death sentence overturned
Sentenced to the death penalty, he saw that sentence overturned in 2009 by the Texas Supreme Court, which felt the jury could not adequately hear the defense. But in 2012 he was again sentenced to death.
In this case, Carl Buntion’s defense attorneys are not trying to prove his innocence. “Every day for the past 32 years, I’ve regretted what happened,” the latter said in an interview with KHOU 11 this week.
But in Texas, the state with the most executions in the United States, a person can only be sentenced to death if a jury determines that they pose a future danger to others.
However, Carl Buntion, who suffers from arthrosis, dizziness, hepatitis and cirrhosis in particular, “can no longer pose a threat,” argue his lawyers in the appeal filed.
Very strict conditions of detention
Carl Buntion, who was convicted of only three disciplinary offenses during his decades in prison, has been isolated in his cell 23 hours a day for 20 years. “In Texas, people on death row are put in a tiny cell with barely a small slit at the top for a window,” recalled Burke Butler, director of the Texas Defender Service Association. They can’t see those they love unless they’re separated by glass or on the phone.”
Last year, the US Supreme Court refused to overturn Carl Buntion’s conviction, but progressive Justice Stephen Breyer said the length of his incarceration “calls into question the constitutionality of the death penalty.”
“It’s a real ethical and human question about the obsession of the state of Texas to want to execute at any cost and under any circumstances,” said Raphaël Chenuil-Hazan, director of the Association Ensemble Against the Death Penalty.
There are 192 men and six women on death row in Texas. Three are in their 70s and five for crimes more than 40 years old.
See also on The HuffPost: Robert Badinter’s lively plea against the death penalty