Tonight, May 14, 2026, the State of Texas executed Edward Lee Busby, Jr., despite unanimous expert findings-and even the State’s own position-that he is intellectually disabled and ineligible for execution. Mr. Busby was sentenced to death in 2005 by a Tarrant County jury for the kidnapping and death of Laura Lee Crane. He faced multiple execution dates in the last six years.
Most recently, Mr. Busby was scheduled for execution in 2021, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) granted a stay to allow review of his intellectual disability claim. Two independent experts-one retained by the defense and one by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office-reached the same conclusion: he meets the full diagnostic criteria for intellectual disability under current clinical standards. The State did not seek a third opinion and ultimately agreed that Mr. Busby is ineligible for the death penalty.
Despite this extraordinary consensus, the trial court rejected these findings based on the judge’s own non-expert opinion. The court dismissed the trained psychologists’ conclusions as “merely informative” and substituted its own judgment for that of trained medical professionals. The CCA then adopted this reasoning, disregarding both expert consensus and the State’s own prior position.
This outcome directly defies U.S. Supreme Court precedent. In Atkins v. Virginia, the Court barred the execution of people with intellectual disability. In Moore v. Texas, it reinforced that courts must rely on current medical standards and expert clinical judgment- not lay intuition or judicial guesswork. Yet in Mr. Busby’s case, the courts disregarded unanimous expert findings and substituted their own non-expert views, employing the very type of reasoning the Supreme Court has already condemned.
On Friday, May 8, 2026, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily stayed Mr. Busby’s execution, pending further order of the court. The State filed an application to vacate the stay with the Supreme Court of the United States.
Around 5:00 PM CT on the day of the execution, an hour before the process was set to begin, the Justices issued an opinion vacating the stay: “The application to vacate [the] stay of execution of sentence of death presented to JUSTICE ALITO and by him referred to the Court is granted.” The vote was 6 to 3.
From the dissent by Justice Jackson, joined by Justice 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.” The majority provided no reason for their vote.
Since 2017, 19 people in Texas have been removed from death row after courts recognized they are intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. These decisions reflect a necessary course correction toward compliance with constitutional standards. Yet Edward Lee Busby, Jr. has been denied that same recognition and now faces execution, even though the experts in his case agree he meets the criteria for intellectual disability.
Mr. Busby filed a clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles requesting that his death sentence be commuted to a lesser penalty or at least a 60-day reprieve. The Board abandoned its usual practice of voting on the application two days before the scheduled execution and instead only voted unanimously against clemency hours after the Supreme Court issued its opinion.
Mr. Busby is the 48th person convicted in Tarrant County to be executed and the 600th person executed by the State of Texas. He is the fourth person put to death by Texas this year.
https://tcadp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/TCADP-Statement-on-the-Execution-of-Edward-Busby.pdf