Earlier this month, Texas executed Edward Lee Busby, Jr., the 600th person executed by the State in the modern death penalty era, Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Executive Director Kristin Houlé Cuellar stated on the tcadp website.
“Mr. Busby, a Black man, was convicted of kidnapping and killing Laura Lee Crane in 2005 in Tarrant County, where prosecutors continue to seek the ultimate punishment at an alarming rate that disproportionately targets people of color. His case exemplifies everything that is wrong with the Texas death penalty: its arbitrariness and geographic isolation, its racially biased application, and the procedural barriers to relief, even in the face of egregious constitutional violations,” Cuellar wrote.
“The egregious constitutional violation” occurred when the State killed Busby after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a week earlier over concerns that Busby’s intellectual disability rendered him ineligible to be executed.
The Court’s three liberal judges opposed lifting the stay. In her dissent, which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that, “the Court finds itself unable to tolerate even a brief delay. 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.”
And while 600 executions over 44 years is a horrific statistic, Cuellar points out that “We we must also acknowledge the tremendous shifts that have occurred in the Texas death penalty landscape in recent years. Executions reflect the legacy of Texas’s use of the death penalty more than its current sentencing practices, as most executions today stem from death sentences that were imposed decades ago.”