HUNTSVILLE (AP) \u2014 A man who experts for both prosecutors and defense attorneys had said was intellectually disabled became the 600th person executed in Texas since 1982, put to death Thursday evening for the killing of a 77-year-old retired college professor.<\/p>\n
Edward Busby Jr. was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. following a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay over his disabilities claims. The execution capped a series of last-minute legal efforts by Busby\u2019s attorneys seeking to spare his life.<\/p>\n
Busby was 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, covering her mouth and nose.<\/p>\n
The execution was the 600th in Texas since it resumed carrying out the death penalty in 1982. Busby also was the fourth person executed this year in Texas and the 12th nationwide. Earlier Thursday, Oklahoma executed Raymond Johnson for killing his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old daughter nearly 20 years ago.<\/p>\n
When asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Busby repeatedly apologized and asked for forgiveness.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am so sorry for what happened,\u201d he said while strapped to the death chamber gurney. \u201cMiss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her.\u201d He said he wished he could \u201ctake it all back\u201d and added he had \u201cno right to get in that car.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll take the blame if that helps.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cpick up your cross.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m here because this is the will of God,\u201d he said before the injection got underway.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Busby\u2019s 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\u2019s Office. The attorney general\u2019s office had argued that similar appeals were previously rejected and were \u201cmeritless\u201d and based on \u201cconflicting evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Busby\u2019s lawyers quickly sought another stay but it was denied by a lower court.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Busby\u2019s attorneys had argued against putting him to death because a defense expert as well as one hired by the Tarrant County District Attorney\u2019s Office, which prosecuted the case, both found he was intellectually disabled.<\/p>\n
The district attorney\u2019s office had previously recommended Busby\u2019s sentence be reduced to life in prison. But the trial judge in Busby\u2019s case disagreed with the findings of intellectual disability and in 2023 upheld the death sentence.<\/p>\n
In a statement Wednesday, the district attorney\u2019s office said it requested Thursday\u2019s execution date because it believed that under current law Busy was not intellectually disabled.<\/p>\n
Two other prior execution dates for Busby had been delayed by courts.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Busby was subsequently arrested in Oklahoma City driving Crane\u2019s car and led authorities to her body in Oklahoma just north of the state line with Texas.<\/p>\n
Latimer is in prison serving a life sentence for murder.<\/p>\n
Bryan Mark Rigg, an author and historian who represented the Crane family as a witness to the execution, said they \u201cneither support or oppose the death penalty. However, they are united in their respect for the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rigg said as a child he was a student of Crane, who for decades helped children overcome learning disabilities and \u201cwas discarded in a field like a piece of trash.\u201d He said the execution was not about vengeance but \u201caccountability under the law and about remembering the life of an extraordinary educator.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HUNTSVILLE (AP) \u2014 A man who experts for both prosecutors and defense attorneys had said was intellectually disabled became the 600th person executed in Texas since 1982, put to death Thursday evening for the killing of a 77-year-old retired college professor. Edward Busby Jr. was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. following a lethal injection at … Continue reading Texas puts man to death for a retired professor\u2019s killing in its 600th execution since 1982<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2851],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1506954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-state-news-archive"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-06 02:51:09","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1506954"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1507325,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506954\/revisions\/1507325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1506954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1506954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1506954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}