Overview
- Edward Lee Busby Jr., 53, was executed by lethal injection Thursday and pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. CDT for the 2004 suffocation death of retired professor Laura Lee Crane, the state prison system said.
- The U.S. Supreme Court vacated a 5th Circuit stay hours earlier in a 6–3 order, with Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissenting as Jackson criticized what she called a rush to execute.
- The 5th Circuit had paused the case last week to weigh new testing on Busby’s intellectual disability and to await guidance from a pending Supreme Court case on how courts should treat multiple IQ scores.
- Experts for the defense and for the Tarrant County district attorney previously found Busby intellectually disabled, yet the DA later sought an execution date, saying current case law did not bar it.
- Busby’s death marked Texas’s 600th execution since 1982, underscoring the state’s outsized share of U.S. executions and drawing fresh objections from anti-death-penalty groups.