Texas executed Edward Busby Jr. on Thursday evening, making him the 600th person put to death in the state since capital punishment resumed in 1982, according to the Associated Press. Busby was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. after lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas.
The execution followed a Supreme Court decision that removed a stay tied to Busby’s claims of intellectual disability, an issue that Busby’s attorneys and experts argued should bar his death sentence. The Supreme Court’s action came after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier issued a stay last week to allow further review of those disability claims.
Busby was condemned for the killing of Laura Lee Crane, a retired college professor who died after prosecutors said she was abducted from a grocery store parking lot in January 2004. Prosecutors said Crane was forced into the trunk of her car and that duct tape wrapped heavily around her face covered her mouth and nose, leaving her to suffocate. Prosecutors said Busby and his co-defendant, Kathleen Latimer, abducted Crane and drove around afterward with Crane in the trunk.
Busby was arrested in Oklahoma City while driving Crane’s car, after authorities said he led them to Crane’s body in Oklahoma just north of the Texas state line. Latimer is serving a life sentence for murder. Prosecutors also said Crane’s death resulted from suffocation after 23 feet (7 meters) of duct tape was wrapped over her entire face.
During the execution process, Busby repeatedly apologized and asked for forgiveness when the warden asked for a final statement. In his final words, Busby said: “I am so sorry for what happened,” and described Crane as “a lovely woman,” saying he “never meant anything bad to happen to her.” He also said he wished he could “take it all back,” adding, “no right to get in that car,” and he said he “will take the blame if that helps.”
Busby also addressed his faith, saying he had surrendered his life to God, and he urged a sister who was praying and watching through a window to “find a church” and “pick up your cross.” As lethal injection began, the sedative pentobarbital started flowing, and the AP account described him taking a sharp breath, closing his eyes, and gasping; his movement and sounds ceased within 40 seconds.
The legal fight over Busby’s intellectual disability developed through multiple court decisions in the final days before the execution. A stay was in place after the 5th Circuit last week ordered further review of Busby’s intellectual-disability claims, but the Supreme Court overturned that stay on Thursday at the request of the Texas attorney general’s office. The attorney general’s office argued that similar appeals had previously been rejected as “meritless” and based on “conflicting evidence.”
Busby’s attorneys then sought another stay, but a lower court denied the request. The Supreme Court had previously barred the execution of intellectually disabled people in 2002, but has allowed states some discretion in how they determine intellectual disability.
Busby’s lawyers had argued that he should not be executed because a defense expert and an expert hired by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office had both found that he was intellectually disabled. The district attorney’s office had previously recommended that Busby’s sentence be reduced to life in prison, but the trial judge in the case disagreed with the intellectual-disability findings and in 2023 upheld the death sentence. In a statement Wednesday, the district attorney’s office said it sought the execution date because it believed that under current law Busby was not intellectually disabled.
As the execution carried Texas’s death-penalty count to 600 since 1982 and added a new case to the list of executions this year, historian and author Bryan Mark Rigg, who represented Crane’s family as a witness to the execution, said the family “neither support or oppose the death penalty,” but said they were “united in their respect for the rule of law.” Rigg said Crane, whom he described as helping children for decades overcome learning disabilities, was “discarded in a field like a piece of trash,” and he said the execution was “not about vengeance” but “accountability under the law and about remembering the life of an extraordinary educator.”