Edward Lee Busby Jr. was executed by Texas Thursday night for the January 2004 abduction and murder of a 78-year-old woman. Photo courtesy Texas Department of Criminal Justice
May 15 (UPI) — Texas on Thursday executed a 53-year-old man for the 2004 murder of an elderly woman, marking the state’s 600th execution of the modern era, despite concerns that his intellectual disability should have barred him from being put to death.
Edward Lee Busby Jr. was administered a lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. He was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. CDT, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice told UPI in an emailed statement.
Busby was executed for murdering 78-year-old Laura Crane on Jan. 30, 2004.
Court documents state that he and co-defendant Kathleen “Kitty” Latimer abducted Crane in Fort Worth, Texas. The pair robbed and then murdered the woman, who died of suffocation from having about 23 feet of duct tape wrapped tightly around her face.
Busby was arrested on Feb. 1 while driving Crane’s vehicle. After initially denying being involved in the woman’s death, he admitted to police that he and Latimer were responsible.
The court documents state that while he “portrayed Kitty as the leader of their criminal enterprise,” he admitted to having “wrapped the duct tape over the victim’s face while also stating several times that he did not mean to kill her.”
Busby was convicted Nov. 11, 2005, of capital murder and sentenced to death. While Latimer was also convicted in the case, she was sentenced to life and is eligible for parole on Jan. 30, 2034, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records.
In his final statement, a copy of which was provided to UPI, Busby repeatedly asked to be forgiven and not to be hated.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, sorry, please forgive me, please don’t hate me,” he said. “Please, find it in your heart to forgive me.”
According to state statistics, Busby is the 600th person to be killed by Texas since late 1982, when it resumed executions following the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision to allow states to reinstate capital punishment.
Late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily stayed Busby’s scheduled execution, citing recent testing by the defense that showed Busby is intellectually disabled — a finding agreed to by an expert witness retained by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office. The new testing followed earlier results at trial that showed low IQ scores.
Earlier Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a divided 6-3 opinion along political lines to vacate the stay, paving the way for Busby’s execution.
All three liberal justices said they would deny the application to vacate the temporary stay, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described in her dissent as “a modest, responsible step taken to allow that court to determine whether Busby is entitled to habeas relief before it is too late.”
“Today, the court finds itself unable to tolerate even a brief delay. Lifting the Fifth Circuit’s stay, the court grants emergency relief to ensure that Texas’ current inclination (that it must execute Busby tonight) wins out over its former one (that it could not execute Busby at all),” Jackson said in a dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“In capital cases, we rarely intervene to preserve life. I cannot understand the court’s rush to extinguish it, much less in the circumstances of this case.”
Busby’s execution was met with pointed disappointment from capital punishment abolitionists.
“Even the prosecutor’s expert agrees that Eddie Busby is intellectually disabled to the point that he should not be executed,” Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action, told UPI in an emailed statement.
“This just shows that finality is more important than facts, and that this U.S. Supreme Court is actively reversing precedents which in the past have protected the least among us. This is yet another shameful day in the history of the Court.”
Texas has carried out more executions than any other state since the resumption of the death penalty.
After Raymond Eugene Johnson was executed earlier Thursday, Oklahoma tied Florida for second-most executions of the modern era with 131, according to statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center.
“Texans are increasingly abandoning the death penalty as a path to justice. Only a handful of counties continue to pursue new death sentences,” the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said in a statement Thursday night.
“Where the death penalty is still used in Texas, it is arbitrary and racially biased, and it continues to ensnare innocent and vulnerable people, all at a tremendous expense to taxpayers.”
With Busby’s death, the United States has executed 12 death row inmates so far this year — two in Oklahoma, four in Texas and six in Florida.
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