HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — On Thursday evening, Texas executed its 600th inmate since 1982, marking a grim milestone with the death of a man deemed intellectually disabled by both prosecution and defense experts. This execution was carried out for the murder of a 77-year-old retired college professor.
Edward Busby Jr.’s life was ended at 8:11 p.m. via lethal injection at Huntsville’s state penitentiary, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to lift a stay regarding his intellectual disabilities claims. His attorneys had launched a series of last-ditch legal maneuvers in an attempt to halt the execution.
Busby was sentenced to death for the suffocation of Laura Lee Crane, a former professor at Texas Christian University. According to prosecutors, Crane was kidnapped from a grocery store parking lot in January 2004 and left to die in the trunk of her car, her face tightly bound with duct tape over her mouth and nose.
This execution marks the 600th since Texas reinstated the death penalty over four decades ago. It also represents the fourth execution in Texas this year and the 12th across the United States. Additionally, on Thursday, Oklahoma carried out the execution of Raymond Johnson for the murder of his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old daughter nearly two decades ago.
When given the opportunity for a final statement, Busby expressed repeated apologies and sought forgiveness.
“I am so sorry for what happened,” he said while strapped to the death chamber gurney. “Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her.” He said he wished he could “take it all back” and added he had “no right to get in that car.”
“I’ll take the blame if that helps.”
He said he had surrendered his life to God and urged a sister, who was praying and watching through a window a short distance away, to find a church and “pick up your cross.”
“I’m here because this is the will of God,” he said before the injection got underway.
As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began flowing, he took a sharp breath, closed his eyes and gasped. Then he made snoring sounds that got progressively quieter. Within 40 seconds, all movement and sounds ceased. He was pronounced dead 38 minutes afterward.
Busby’s execution had been in doubt after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued a stay of execution to further review his claims of intellectual disability. But the Supreme Court overturned the stay Thursday at the request of the Texas Attorney General’s Office. The attorney general’s office had argued that similar appeals were previously rejected and were “meritless” and based on “conflicting evidence.”
Busby’s lawyers quickly sought another stay but it was denied by a lower court.
The Supreme Court in 2002 had barred the execution of intellectually disabled people. But it has given states some discretion to decide how to determine such disabilities.
Busby’s attorneys had argued against putting him to death because a defense expert as well as one hired by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, both found he was intellectually disabled.
The district attorney’s office had previously recommended Busby’s sentence be reduced to life in prison. But the trial judge in Busby’s case disagreed with the findings of intellectual disability and in 2023 upheld the death sentence.
In a statement Wednesday, the district attorney’s office said it requested Thursday’s execution date because it believed that under current law Busy was not intellectually disabled.
Two other prior execution dates for Busby had been delayed by courts.
Prosecutors have said Busby and his co-defendant, Kathleen Latimer, abducted Crane in her car from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot and later put in her vehicle’s trunk as they drove around. Prosecutors said she died in the trunk after suffocating from having 23 feet (7 meters) of duct tape wrapped over her entire face.
Busby was subsequently arrested in Oklahoma City driving Crane’s car and led authorities to her body in Oklahoma just north of the state line with Texas.
Latimer is in prison serving a life sentence for murder.
Bryan Mark Rigg, an author and historian who represented the Crane family as a witness to the execution, said they “neither support or oppose the death penalty. However, they are united in their respect for the rule of law.”
Rigg said as a child he was a student of Crane’s, who for decades helped children overcome learning disabilities and “was discarded in a field like a piece of trash.” He said the execution was not about vengeance but “accountability under the law and about remembering the life of an extraordinary educator.”
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Lozano reported from Houston. Follow Juan A. Lozano: