Convicted in the 2004 suffocation killing of retired Texas Christian University professor Laura Lee Crane, Edward Busby Jr. was put to death Thursday as the 600th person executed in Texas since capital punishment resumed there in 1982, the Associated Press reported. He was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection at the Huntsville state penitentiary.
According to prosecutors, Busby and co-defendant Kathleen Latimer snatched Crane, 77, from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot in January 2004, forcing her into the trunk of her own vehicle as they drove around. She died there, asphyxiated beneath 23 feet of duct tape that had been wound across her entire face. Authorities apprehended Busby in Oklahoma City, where he was found behind the wheel of Crane's vehicle; he subsequently directed investigators to her body, which was located in Oklahoma a short distance north of the Texas state line, the AP reported.
Earlier that day, the Supreme Court had vacated a stay the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had put in place while it examined Busby's intellectual disability claims, clearing the path for the execution to go forward. The decision was not unanimous — three members of the high court would have left the stay intact. "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," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent, according to CBS News.
