Edward Lee Busby Jr. was pronounced dead Thursday evening following a lethal injection in Huntsville, becoming the 600th person executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982 – a milestone reached only after a last-minute legal battle that stretched from federal appeals courts to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Busby, 53, had been convicted in a Tarrant County courtroom in 2005 for the kidnapping and murder of Laura Lee Crane, a 77-year-old retired Texas Christian University professor.
Investigators in Busby’s case believe that Crane was abducted from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot in January 2004, robbed, driven to Oklahoma, and left to suffocate in the trunk of her car with duct tape wrapped tightly around her face, as previously reported by DX.
Busby was arrested in Oklahoma City days later, still driving Crane’s car.
Final Words
Strapped to the gurney inside the death chamber, Busby delivered an extended final statement pleading for forgiveness from Crane’s family.
According to a transcript provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), Busby said: “Sir, Ma’am, I am so sorry, I ask that you please, please don’t hate me and that you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the part that I played in what happened to her. Ms. Crane was a lovely woman, I never meant anything bad to happen to her. I am so sorry, I am so, so sorry, but I feel asleep and I don’t know what happened. Please forgive me, please, if not for me for yourself. Because the Father said if we don’t forgive those who wrong us, He will not forgive us. And I know that you are angry, I know you’re angry and I’m sorry, I’m not happy about what happened…”
His full final statement is available via the official TDCJ website.
A Legal Battle to the Very End
The road to Thursday’s execution was anything but routine.
Busby’s attorneys had argued for years that he has an intellectual disability – a condition that, under the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, prohibits a person from being executed. Nearly every expert who evaluated Busby — including the one the Tarrant County DA’s own office paid — concluded he had an intellectual disability. The prosecution’s own hired expert agreed that the man they were trying to execute was constitutionally ineligible for execution.
As such, on May 8, 2026, a Fifth Circuit panel voted to temporarily halt the execution, with the majority writing that when a man’s life is on the line, courts need to be certain they’re applying the right legal standard before proceeding.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in and asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the stay. The high court agreed on May 14, lifting the Fifth Circuit’s hold in a short order. Busby’s lawyers then made one last attempt to halt the execution back in the Fifth Circuit after the Supreme Court ruled, but it was too late.
Thursday wasn’t even Busby’s first brush with the death chamber.
His 2020 execution was called off because of COVID, and the following year, a Texas appeals court stepped in again to take a second look at his intellectual disability claim – only for a trial court to ultimately reject it, leaving his defense team with nowhere to turn.
The Other Side of Justice: Exonerations
While Texas executed its 600th prisoner, a separate story was unfolding just up Interstate 35.
This week, the City of Austin reached a tentative $35 million settlement with three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongfully accused of one of Texas’ most notorious crimes: the 1991 “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” murders, per AP News.
Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison – four teenage girls – were raped and killed during the horrific crime spree at an Austin yogurt shop on December 6, 1991.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn, and Maurice Pierce were accused in the case. Springsteen was convicted and sent to death row, and Scott received a life sentence. Their convictions were eventually overturned, even though prosecutors tried to retry them for years.
Pierce, who spent three years in jail before charges were dropped, died in 2010 in a confrontation with police.
A Travis County judge formally declared all four men innocent in February 2026 after cold case investigators determined serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers – who died in 1999 – had committed the crime alone, a conclusion backed by DNA evidence found under one victim’s fingernail.
Within the same week Texas hit its 600th execution, it also cut a $35 million check to compensate the three men and the family of the fourth. The $35 million tentative settlement could be one of the largest of its kind in the city of Austin’s history.
Recent Exonerations Across the U.S.
Within the last year alone, America has had at least 8 high-profile legal exonerations, according to the exoneration registry:
- Yogurt Shop Four (Texas, 2026): Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn, and Maurice Pierce were formally declared innocent in February after DNA evidence linked serial killer Robert Brashers to the 1991 murders of four teenage girls.
- Kenneth Windley (New York, March 2026): Freed after nearly 20 years in prison for a robbery he didn’t commit, cleared after the actual robber confessed.
- Clarence Jordan (Texas, April 2026): Death sentence overturned after nearly 50 years on Texas death row. The court found the 70-year-old, who has intellectual disabilities, should never have faced execution.
- Sandra Hemme (Missouri, December 2024): Formally exonerated after 44 years — the longest known wrongful incarceration of any woman in American history — for a 1980 murder.
- C.J. Rice (Pennsylvania, 2025): Freed after 12 years for a 2011 Philadelphia shooting he did not commit.
- Frank Drew (Illinois, 2025): Exonerated after 24 years wrongfully imprisoned for a 1996 homicide.
- John Brandon Lamotte (Kentucky, October 2025): Wrongfully convicted in 2019 for an alleged stabbing, freed after eight years when the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the reversal of his conviction.
- Two Illinois Men (Chicago, 2025): A jury awarded $120 million to two men wrongfully convicted of a 2003 murder, setting a new record for wrongful conviction damages in Chicago.
