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. And 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 49 states not named Texas.
Kristin Houle Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, has described the phenomena as a “lethal lottery” in determining which of the state’s capital murder cases receive a death sentence.
“Zip code is essentially the number one determining factor [of] whether the death penalty is going to be sought in an individual case,” Cuellar said. “That trend is persistent throughout Texas’ 44-year history of the death penalty in its current iteration, but it’s even more pronounced now.”
Like Brooks almost 44 years ago, Busby was convicted in Tarrant County, the No. 3 Texas county for executions and No. 2 in the number of inmates on death row, said Burke Butler, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, an advocacy organization that helps represent those with capital convictions.
“When we look at the death penalty in Texas, we’re increasingly looking at the story not of a state that is a voracious seeker of the death penalty, but a handful, a tiny handful of counties that are voraciously seeking this punishment,” Butler said. “Tarrant County is truly one of the leaders when it comes to that.”
Tarrant County surpassed Bexar County in March with the execution of Cedric Ricks, convicted in 2014 for stabbing his wife and her 8-year-old son to death. Tarrant County has sought more death sentences at trial than any other since 2020, according to the Texas Defender Service.
Death penalty opponents also say executions are disproportionately applied against defendants of color, particularly Black men, who accounted for almost 36% of Texas’ executions since 1982. Black Texans represent roughly 12% of the state population, according to the Texas Demographic Center.
Three of the four defendants executed in Texas this year so far, including Busby, were Black men.
Anthony Graves, one of 18 men who have been exonerated after spending time on Texas’ death row, said he believed racism contributed to his wrongful conviction and death sentence. Graves spent 16 years on death row and two more in prison after being convicted of killing a family in Somerville and setting fire to their home. During his trial, then-Burleson County District Attorney Charles Sebesta withheld an admission from Graves’ co-defendant, Robert Carter, that he had committed the murders alone.
Sebesta also falsely stated in court that Graves’ girlfriend, who was expected to present an alibi for Graves, was a suspect in the case. She refused to testify after the statement was made. Sebesta was later disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct related to Graves’ case.
In an interview, Graves said he felt the prosecutor’s misconduct “ran [him] through the system” because he is Black. But while he believed his trial was influenced by racism, the dehumanization became universal once he and others arrived on death row.
“They took a piece of cloth, and cut out a case, and attached me to it and tried to murder me. That was race,” said Graves, who now runs the Peer Navigator Project, which trains attorneys and inmates on how to navigate appeals.
“I know it was race, but behind those walls has nothing to do with race. You see Black people, you see white people, you see Hispanic people, and everybody’s down there to be murdered,” he said.
A May report from Texas Defender Services and researchers from the University of Houston found that Black men accounted for 69% of Tarrant County’s death penalty cases since 2012.
The report also found that 10% of the 431 people charged with capital murder in Tarrant County served no jail time, as a grand jury did not indict them, charges were dropped or they were sentenced to probation. Two-thirds of those who did not serve jail time after being charged with capital murder were Black, according to the report.
The Tarrant County district attorney’s office did not respond to questions about the report but provided a statement from District Attorney Phil Sorrells defending Busby’s death sentence.
“My job is to seek justice, give a voice to the victims of these horrific crimes, and hold defendants accountable,” Sorrells said. “The death penalty is reserved for the worst crimes. This is one of them. My thoughts and sympathy are with the family and friends of Laura Lee Crane.”
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.
“You have this whole population of people whose death sentences would no longer be considered constitutional these days,” Cuellar said.
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.
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This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
