USA - Edward Busby (TX)

USA - Texas. Edward Busby, 53, Black, was executed on May 14

May 14, 2026:

May 14, 2026 - Texas. Edward Busby, 53, Black, was executed on May 14

12^th execution of the year in the US

Texas executed its 600th inmate Thursday evening, administering a lethal injection to Edward Busby in Huntsville and reinforcing its status as the nation’s leading death penalty state even as the pace of executions continues to slow.

Florida is a distant second, having executed 131 people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Roughly half of the inmates executed in Texas were sentenced to death in four of its 254 counties: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar. Harris County alone has seen 138 of its death sentences carried out, more than any of the 49 states not named Texas.
Busby was convicted in Tarrant County, the No. 3 Texas county for executions and No. 2 in the number of inmates on death row

Busby, convicted in 2005 in the deadly robbery and kidnapping of 78-year-old Laura Crane, had been granted a stay of execution last week when a federal appeals court cited concerns about his eligibility for capital punishment because of intellectual disability, after several assessments of Busby’s IQ, according to the records, have fallen within the range of 65 and 75 across numerous examinations over the years, findings the prosecution’s expert said showed “substantial intellectual deficits.”

The U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay Thursday afternoon over the objections of the court’s three liberal justices, and Busby was escorted into the death chamber in Huntsville later that evening.

In his final statement Thursday evening, Busby apologized repeatedly for Crane’s death and said he “never meant anything bad to happen to her.”

“I am so sorry for what happened. … Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her,” he said. “I’ll take the blame if it will help.”

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 was declared dead at 8:11 p.m.

Busby and his co-defendant, Kathleen Latimer, were condemned for the suffocation death of Laura Lee Crane, a retired professor from Texas Christian University. Prosecutors said she was abducted from a grocery store parking lot in January 2004 and left to suffocate in the trunk of her car with duct tape wrapped heavily around her face, as they drove around. 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, 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.”