Texas Executes 600th Inmate Since Death Penalty was Reinstated

By Ayden Runnels / The Texas Tribune

HUNTSVILLE, TX — Texas executed its 600th inmate Thursday evening, administering a lethal injection to Edward Busby in Huntsville and reinforcing its status as the nation’s leading death penalty state even as the pace of executions continues to slow.

Florida is a distant second, having executed 131 people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Busby, convicted in 2005 in the deadly robbery and kidnapping of 78-year-old Laura Crane, had been granted a stay of execution last week when a federal appeals court cited concerns about his eligibility for capital punishment because of intellectual disability.

The U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay Thursday afternoon over the objections of the court’s three liberal justices, and Busby was escorted into the death chamber in Huntsville later that evening.

In his final statement, Busby apologized repeatedly for Crane’s death and said he “never meant anything bad to happen to her.”

“I am so sorry for what happened. … Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her,” he said. “I’ll take the blame if it will help.”

Busby was declared dead at 8:11 p.m., 43 years and 5 months after Texas executed its first inmate in the modern era — Charlie Brooks Jr, who was also the first person in the U.S. to be put to death by lethal injection. Brooks’ sentence set Texas on a path toward becoming the nation’s leader in applying the death penalty, putting more inmates to death than the next four states combined.

Most of Texas’ 600 executions occurred in a span of about a decade around the turn of the century, when the state was executing upwards of 40 people a year. While the state’s use of capital punishment has dwindled in recent years, certain trends continue, including a pronounced geographical tilt.

Roughly half of the inmates executed in Texas were sentenced to death in four of its 254 counties: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar. Harris County alone has seen 138 of its death sentences carried out, more than any of the other 49 states.

Over the past two decades, new laws and legal precedents have whittled away at Texas’ use of the death penalty, rendering some death row inmates ineligible for execution and providing alternative avenues beyond the ultimate punishment. 

A major change came in 2005, when a new state law gave prosecutors the option of seeking a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for capital murder. In addition, juries asked to impose a death sentence were given the option to instead choose life without parole. That year marked the first in decades the number of new death sentences fell below 20 in the state.

Another milestone came in 2013 when state lawmakers passed the Michael Morton Act, which requires prosecutors to disclose all evidence — including favorable evidence and police reports — to defense lawyers. Morton served almost 25 years in prison for murdering his wife before DNA evidence revealed another man was the killer. After Morton was freed in 2011, his lawyers discovered Williamson County prosecutors had withheld evidence that could have challenged his guilt. 

The Morton Act went into effect in January 2014, and by the end of 2015, new death sentences for the first time dropped into the single digits. 

The two new laws laid the groundwork for the declining use of the death penalty, said Chandler Raine, Harris County’s first assistant district attorney. 

“I mean, especially post-Michael Morton, we went through a reckoning that needed to be gone through,” Raine said in a February interview regarding how Harris County handles its death penalty cases. “I’m so proud to be a part of a profession that’s constantly willing to change and to evolve and to move forward with our community, and look at things like the death penalty, and make sure that we are being as judicious as we possibly can with the ultimate penalty.”

Precedent-setting decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have also limited who is eligible to be put to death. 

A major ruling in 2002 found executing people with intellectual disabilities was unconstitutional, with two subsequent decisions tightening Texas standards to ensure those protections are sufficient.

In 2017 and 2019 rulings striking down the death sentence of Bobby Moore, the Supreme Court required Texas’ highest criminal court to use updated medical standards to determine whether a convicted inmate was intellectually disabled. Moore was convicted for shooting a 73-year-old clerk during a Houston robbery in 1980, but was determined by a court in 2014 to be intellectually disabled under current medical standards.

Since 2017, 20 people have been removed from Texas’ death row based on intellectual disability, the latest being Clarence Curtis Jordan in early April. Jordan had been on death row for 47 years for the murder of a Houston grocer.

The court rulings offer new avenues for justice, but they also cast a shadow over previous executions that would have been blocked under modern legal standards — including minors, Cuellar said. A 2005 Supreme Court ruling barred executing people under age 18, removing 28 Texans from death row who were juveniles at the time of their crimes.

Between 1982 and the Supreme Court ruling, Texas had executed 13 people who committed their crimes as minors, the most in the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. 

There are 166 people currently on death row, with convictions dating as far back as 1977 and most in some phase of the appellate process.

The next executions are scheduled for a week apart in mid-September for Ramey Ker’sean Olajuwa and LeJames Norman, who were both sentenced to death in Jackson County for shooting three people in their own apartment during a robbery.

Two other executions are scheduled for later this year.