78 year old Carl Buntion gunned down Houston police officer James Irby during a traffic stop in 1990. He was a passenger in a car Irby pulled over and shot the motorcycle officer once in the head and twice in the back.
On Thursday night, Buntion was given a lethal injection. Irby's widow Maura Irby witnessed the execution and expressed her relief. "It was an amazing feeling and I felt like I took the deepest breath I've been able to in the last 32 years. I feel joy. I'm sorry that someone died but I didn't think of him as a person. I thought of him as a thing, as a cancer on the face of my family."
Buntion's attorneys had appealed to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, claiming Buntion was infirmed and no longer a threat. They were turned down and also turned down by the US Supreme Court.
Buntion's execution was the first of the year in Texas, and the first in which a spiritual advisor was allowed to lay hands and pray with the condemned during the procedure. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg says Irby didn't have that comfort. "There was no one to touch him during his dying moments, there was no one to say a prayer for him. God rest the soul of James Irby." She also called Buntion a career criminal who graduated into sex offending and became a child rapist. And after that "he became a cold-blooded executioner of James Irby."
"Until his dying breath, while Carl Buntion said he had remorse, he claimed it was a shootout. He never accepted total responsibility for his actions."
Robert Hurst with the Texas Department of Criminal says Buntion's final statement was nearly five minutes long in which he expressed remorse and recounted how he found Christianity.
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