Supreme Court clears Texas execution after intellectual-disability dispute

The Supreme Court’s divided order cleared the way for Texas to carry out Edward Lee Busby’s execution at 6 p.m. CDT on May 14 at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, a case that has become a sharp test of how the courts handle last-minute intellectual-disability claims in death-penalty litigation. If Busby received the lethal injection as scheduled, he became the 600th person executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982.

In Guerrero v. Busby, the justices vacated the Fifth Circuit’s May 8 stay over Busby’s intellectual-disability arguments. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented. Busby’s own expert concluded that he is intellectually disabled, and a Texas-hired expert agreed, according to the dissent and court filings described in the record. The Texas Attorney General’s Office asked the Supreme Court to lift the stay, and after the high court acted, Busby’s lawyers returned to the Fifth Circuit with another stay request that was swiftly denied.

The case had already moved through a Texas trial court, where a judge upheld Busby’s death sentence in 2023. The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office had previously recommended that Busby’s sentence be reduced to life in prison. In a statement on Wednesday, the office said it requested the execution date because, “under current case law, we believe Mr. Busby is not intellectually disabled.” That reversal placed the county’s earlier position at odds with the state’s push to proceed.

Busby was condemned for the January 2004 suffocation death of Laura Lee Crane, a 77-year-old retired Texas Christian University professor. Prosecutors said Crane was abducted from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot and left to suffocate in the trunk of her car, with duct tape wrapped around her face. Busby was later arrested in Oklahoma City while driving Crane’s car.

The legal stakes reached beyond one case. The Supreme Court barred the execution of intellectually disabled people in 2002, but left states room to decide how disability is determined. The court also heard an Alabama case in December 2025 that could affect how multiple IQ scores are weighed in those assessments, adding another unresolved layer to a doctrine that remains disputed at the margins. Busby was described as quiet and prayerful on the van ride from death row in Livingston to Huntsville, a final trip that underscored how quickly an emergency order can decide life and death in Texas’s capital system.