HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Texas reached a grim milestone Thursday evening when officials executed a man whose intellectual disabilities had been acknowledged by experts on both sides of the case, making him the 600th person put to death in the state since capital punishment resumed in 1982.
Edward Busby Jr. was declared dead at 8:11 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. The execution proceeded after the U.S. Supreme Court removed a stay that had been granted over questions about his mental capacity. His legal team had mounted numerous final appeals to prevent the execution.
Busby had been sentenced to die for the suffocation murder of Laura Lee Crane, a 77-year-old former professor at Texas Christian University. According to prosecutors, Crane was taken from a grocery store parking lot in January 2004 and died after being placed in her car’s trunk with 23 feet of duct tape covering her entire face, blocking her ability to breathe.
This execution represents Texas’s 600th since the state reinstated the death penalty four decades ago. Busby became the fourth person executed in Texas this year and the 12th across the United States. The same day, Oklahoma also carried out an execution of Raymond Johnson, who had killed his former girlfriend and her infant daughter nearly two decades earlier.
During his final moments, when the warden offered him the opportunity to make a last statement, Busby expressed repeated remorse and pleaded for forgiveness.
“I am so sorry for what happened,” he said while restrained on the execution table. “Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her.” He expressed wishes that he could “take it all back” and acknowledged he had “no right to get in that car.”
“I’ll take the blame if that helps.”
He spoke about giving his life to God and encouraged his sister, who was watching and praying from behind a nearby window, to find a church and “pick up your cross.”
“I’m here because this is the will of God,” he said before the lethal injection began.
When the pentobarbital sedative started flowing, Busby took a sudden breath, shut his eyes and gasped. He then made snoring noises that gradually became quieter. All movement and sounds stopped within 40 seconds, though he wasn’t officially declared dead until 38 minutes later.
The execution had appeared uncertain after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay last week to examine his intellectual disability claims more thoroughly. However, the Supreme Court reversed that stay Thursday following a request from the Texas Attorney General’s Office, which contended that similar challenges had been previously dismissed and were “meritless” due to “conflicting evidence.”
Busby’s legal representatives immediately sought another stay, but a lower court rejected their request.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing intellectually disabled individuals violates constitutional protections. However, the court has allowed states flexibility in determining how to assess such disabilities.
Busby’s defense team had contended that his execution should not proceed because experts hired by both the defense and the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office had concluded he was intellectually disabled.
The district attorney’s office had previously recommended changing Busby’s sentence to life imprisonment. However, the trial judge rejected the intellectual disability findings and maintained the death sentence in 2023.
In a Wednesday statement, the district attorney’s office explained it had requested Thursday’s execution date because it determined that under existing law, Busby did not qualify as intellectually disabled.
Courts had previously postponed two other scheduled execution dates for Busby.
According to prosecutors, Busby and his accomplice, Kathleen Latimer, kidnapped Crane from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot and forced her into her vehicle’s trunk while they drove around. Prosecutors stated she died from suffocation after having 23 feet of duct tape wrapped around her face.
Busby was later apprehended in Oklahoma City while driving Crane’s vehicle and directed authorities to her body in Oklahoma, just across the Texas border.
Latimer is currently serving a life sentence for murder.
Bryan Mark Rigg, an author and historian representing the Crane family as an execution witness, stated they “neither support or oppose the death penalty. However, they are united in their respect for the rule of law.”
Rigg, who had been Crane’s student as a child, described how she spent decades helping children with learning disabilities and “was discarded in a field like a piece of trash.” He emphasized the execution was not about revenge but “accountability under the law and about remembering the life of an extraordinary educator.”
