source: Texas Tribune

published: 14 May 2026

Image Credit: Jimmy Chan at www.Pexels.com

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 Houlé 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.”

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