Texas executes man experts said was intellectually disabled in professor killing

Edward Lee Busby Jr. was put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay that had briefly halted the execution, and he was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. local time. The execution was Texas’s 600th since the state resumed carrying out death sentences in 1982, a stark marker of how often the state has tested the limits of capital punishment.

Busby, 53, was condemned for the January 2004 kidnapping and suffocation death of Laura Lee Crane, a 77-year-old retired Texas Christian University professor. Prosecutors said Crane was taken from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot, placed in the trunk of her car with duct tape wrapped around her face, and left to suffocate. Busby was later arrested in Oklahoma City while driving Crane’s car, and her body was found in Oklahoma near the Texas border.

The case became as much about legal standards as about the crime itself. Busby’s lawyers said experts for both the defense and the prosecution found him intellectually disabled, making him ineligible for execution under the Supreme Court’s 2002 Atkins decision. The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, however, said it believed Busby was not intellectually disabled under current case law and supported the Texas Attorney General’s request to let the execution proceed. The office had previously recommended that Busby’s sentence be reduced to life in prison, while a trial judge upheld the death sentence in 2023.

Busby’s death sentence had already moved through years of delay and review. He was convicted in 2005, was first scheduled for execution on May 6, 2020, and then saw another execution date pushed back in 2021 during the pandemic. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the execution on May 8, 2026, citing concerns over his eligibility for capital punishment, before the Supreme Court reversed that stay at the request of the Texas Attorney General’s Office. Three justices, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

The fight over Busby’s case reflected a broader national argument over who should bear the weight of a death sentence. The Arc, Disability Rights Texas and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities filed an amicus brief urging Texas courts to rely on clinical standards rather than stereotypes when judging intellectual disability. The Death Penalty Information Center says 144 death sentences have been vacated since 2002 because of intellectual disability. In Texas, where executions continue at a pace no other state matches, the unresolved question remains central: how a man experts said was intellectually disabled still made it to the death chamber.