Texas Executes 600th Prisoner Since Reinstating Death Penalty in 1976
On May 14, 2026, the state of Texas executed its 600th prisoner with the killing of Edward Busby Jr., a man that experts for both prosecutors and defense attorneys testified to be intellectually disabled, via lethal injection.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Texas has put to death more prisoners than the next four states combined, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalthy (TCADP). Florida is a distant second, having executed 131 people in the same time frame. Most of Texas’s 600 executions occurred from 2000–2010; in that decade, it was executing as many as 40 prisoners per year.
Unlike Florida, which executed a state record of 19 people in 2025, Texas’ use of capital punishment has decreased in recent years—and among the prisoners who were executed, most received a death sentence in just four of Texas’s 254 counties: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar. [See: PLN, Jan. 2026, p.14.] As The Texas Tribune reported, Harris County is by far the deadliest place to be sentenced, as 138 of its death sentences have been carried out.
“Zip code is essentially the number one determining factor of whether the death penalty is going to be sought in an individual case,” Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the TCADP, told The Texas Tribune, describing the phenomena as a “lethal lottery.” Cuellar continued, “That trend is persistent throughout Texas’ 44-year history of the death penalty in its current iteration, but it’s even more pronounced now.”
Texas’s executions, in addition to being lopsided geographically, were also disproportionally meted out to Black prisoners. Although Black Texans only represent 12% of the state’s population, they accounted for more than one-third of its executions. Busby, who was Black, was convicted in Tarrant County, where Black men were subject to 69% of the death penalty cases since 2012, according to a report from the Texas Defender Services and researchers from the University of Houston. Including Busby, three of the four prisoners executed in Texas in 2026 so far were Black men.
Busby’s execution, administered at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, was in doubt just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay over his intellectual disability claims. The week before, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit had paused the execution pending further review. [See: Busby v. Guerrero, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 13549 (5th Cir. 2026).] While the Supreme Court banned executing intellectually disabled people in 2002, it has given states discretion in evaluating intellectual disability claims. [See: Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002).]
The three liberal justices on the Supreme Court opposed the order overturning the 5th Circuit decision. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote, “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.” [Guerrero v. Busby, 2026 U.S. 2038 (2026)].
Additional sources: Associated Press, The Texas Tribune
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Related legal case
Guerrero v. Busby
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 2026 U.S. 2038 (2026) |
| Level | Supreme Court |