| On May 14, Texas plans to put Edward Busby to death for the 2004 murder of Laura Lee Crane, a retired Texas Christian University Professor. If Texas goes through with that plan, Busby will be the 600th person to be executed in Texas in the last forty-two years. |
| That is more executions over the last four decades than any other state by far. In fact, Texas alone is responsible for approximately 34% of the 1,664 executions conducted in the United States since 1977. The Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty (TCADP) reports that ”72% of Texas’ executions took place between 1996 and 2015; the last decade accounts for 11%. |
| So far in 2026, Texas has put three people to death this year and, after Busby, has two more executions scheduled before the end of the year. While its use of the death penalty has declined dramatically since the late 1990s, every year it continues to be among this country’s leading execution states. |
| Not surprisingly, Texas has had its share of exonerations from death row and botched executions. And its death penalty system is rife with racial discrimination. As the TCADP notes, it “continues to ensnare innocent and vulnerable people.” |
| America won’t end its infatuation with capital punishment until Texas ends its. As this red state trends toward purple, it is time for political leaders in the Lone Star State to lead the way in opposing state killing. |
| James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate, offers an example of that kind of leadership. He has a longstanding anti-death penalty record. In 2024, he criticized the Texas Republican Party for advocating the death penalty for women who get abortions. |
| “This is happening on the ground in my state and in red states across the country…[I] urge my fellow Texans and my fellow Americans to avoid this path, because it only leads to death and despair.” |
| In 2025, Talarico co-sponsored a bill in the Texas legislature to bar the execution of offenders who had a severe mental illness (such as schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder with active psychosis) at the time they committed a capital crime. |
| But surveys suggest that people like Talarico have a lot of work to do. Support for capital punishment in Texas remains strong, with 63% of respondents to a 2021 poll saying they support the death penalty for “people convicted of violent crimes.” |
| While that is a significant decline from 2010, when the number was 78%, Texas has a long way to go before it can relegate the death penalty to the dustbin of history. |
| Its use of capital punishment dates back to 1819, when George Brown was hanged for piracy. Before Texas statehood in 1846, all executions were carried out by hanging, with 390 people executed by counties between 1819 and 1923. |
| In 1923, the state took over responsibility for carrying out death sentences when it adopted the electric chair as its execution method. The next year, Charles Reynolds became the first person put to death in the Huntsville State Prison. Four others were executed the same day. |
| Texas has played an outsized role in the crafting of modern death penalty jurisprudence. On July 2, 1976, the United States Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in this country after a four-year suspension. |
| That same day, it approved a Texas statute that “limit[ed] capital homicides to intentional and knowing murders committed in five situations.” The Court gave its blessing to the state’s “capital sentencing procedure, which requires the jury to answer the following three questions in a proceeding that takes place after a verdict finding a person guilty of one of the specified murder categories.” |
| They were: |
(1) whether the conduct of the defendant causing the death was committed deliberately and with the reasonable expectation that the death would result; (2) whether it is probable that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence constituting a continuing threat to society; and (3) if raised by the evidence, whether the defendant’s conduct was an unreasonable response to the provocation, if any, by the deceased.
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| And in 1982, the state achieved another milestone, when it became the first state in the nation to put someone to death by lethal injection. If Texas goes through with the Busby execution, it will add another to the list of the state’s dubious distinctions. |
| Texas already leads the nation in sentencing to death and executing people with intellectual disabilities. In 2012, it put a man to death who had an IQ of 61. He could not use a phone book, could not match his socks, and sucked his thumb into adulthood. |
| In 2017, the Equal Justice Initiative reported that Texas had “executed 30 to 40 people with strong claims of intellectual disability, and a similar number of the more than 200 people currently facing execution in Texas likewise have strong evidence that they should be exempt from the death penalty.” |
| Two years later, the Texas Tribuneobserved that the state Legislature had not “come up with a process for determining whether death penalty defendants are intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution…leaving that job to the courts—resulting in a hodgepodge system of deciding the crucial question of whether a person facing a death sentence should be spared from execution.” |
| Nothing has changed since then. |
| Edward Busby is intellectually disabled and mentally ill. In fact, in 2023, the state of Texas even agreed that he was. |
| But, as Busby’s clemency petition makes clear, after a hearing on the question of whether Busby was eligible to be executed, the trial judge, complaining that “experts were not there to answer questions the court believed the experts should have been asked at the hearing,” made his own determination. He ruled that Busby’s execution could proceed. |
| Subsequently, the Court of Criminal Appeals “adopted most of the trial court’s findings and denied relief.” Here, as in other cases, that court, the clemency petition alleges, “has approached straightforward defiance” of the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling that execution of the intellectually disabled is unconstitutional. |
| Busby is asking the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend clemency to the governor or to grant a 60-day reprieve. If it does not, and if Texas carries out its 600th execution, the state will, as his clemency petition rightly suggests, “once again be…the pariah” in a nation which long ago should have abolished the death penalty. |
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