Oldest Texas death row inmate executed over 1990 killing

Texas’ oldest death row inmate has been executed for killing a Houston police officer during a traffic stop nearly 32 years ago.

Carl Wayne Buntion, 78, was executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.

He was condemned over the fatal shooting of Houston police officer James Irby, a near 20-year member of the force, in June 1990.

The US supreme court had declined a request by Buntion’s attorneys to stop his execution.

“I wanted the Irby family to know one thing: I do have remorse for what I did,” Buntion said while strapped to the Texas death chamber gurney.

“I hope to see you in heaven some day and when you show up I will give you a big hug.”

Buntion, joined by his spiritual adviser, began praying Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd…” as the lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital began.

He took a deep breath, coughed once, then took three less pronounced breaths before all movement stopped.

He was pronounced dead at 6.39pm, 13 minutes later.

Buntion had been on parole for just six weeks when he shot the 37-year-old Irby. Buntion, who had an extensive criminal record, was a passenger in the car that Irby pulled over.

In 2009, an appeals court vacated Buntion’s sentence, but another jury resentenced him to death three years later.

“I feel joy,” the officer’s widow, 60-year-old Maura Irby, said after watching Buntion’s execution.

“I’m sorry someone died. But I didn’t think of him as a person. I just thought of him as a thing, as a cancer on the face of my family.”

Before he was killed, James Irby had talked of retirement and spending more time with his two children, who at the time were one and three years old, Maura Irby said earlier.

“He was ready to fill out the paperwork and stay home and open a feed store,” she said. “He wanted to be the dad that was there to go to all the ballgames and the father-daughter dances. He was a super guy, the love of my life.”

Leading up to his execution, various state and federal courts had also turned down appeals by Buntion’s lawyers to stop his death sentence. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had rejected his clemency request on Tuesday.

His lawyers described Buntion as a geriatric inmate who posed no threat as he suffers from arthritis, vertigo and needed a wheelchair.

“This delay of three decades undermines the rationale for the death penalty … Whatever deterrent effect there is diminished by delay,” lawyers David Dow and Jeffrey Newberry wrote in court documents.

With his execution, Buntion became the oldest person Texas has put to death since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1976.

The oldest inmate executed in the US in modern times was Walter Moody Jr, who was 83 years old when he was put to death in Alabama in 2018.

Buntion was also the first inmate executed in Texas in 2022. Although Texas has been America’s busiest capital punishment state, it had been nearly seven months since it carried out an execution.