The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Texas to execute Edward Busby on Thursday, ending a temporary reprieve that had held the punishment off for nearly a week. Busby had been scheduled to die at 6 p.m. CT, after the justices rejected a lower court stay that had paused the case over whether his intellectual disabilities made him ineligible for execution.

Liberal justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor opposed the ruling. Jackson wrote in dissent that Texas's own expert found that Busby is too intellectually disabled to be executed, and said, “I cannot understand the Court’s rush to extinguish it, much less in the circumstances of this case.”

Busby was convicted in the 2004 robbery and murder of Laura Lee Crane, a 77-year-old former Texas Christian University professor who was attacked while on a grocery store run in Fort Worth. On Jan. 30, 2004, Busby and his girlfriend kidnapped Crane near her home, put her in the trunk of her own car and wrapped her head in duct tape. Her body was later found wrapped in a white sheet on the side of a highway near Davis, Oklahoma. Busby led authorities to the body.

The case turned not on what happened that day, but on whether Busby’s mental condition places him outside the reach of the death penalty. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a temporary stay on Friday, May 8, citing Busby’s intellectual disabilities, before Texas appealed and won review at the Supreme Court.

That question matters in Texas now because the state has carried out 599 executions since 1976, more than any other state in the nation, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The group said Busby would become the 600th person executed in Texas in the last 50 years if the sentence goes forward.

The facts of the killing were described in stark terms at the time. Greg Miller said, “The trunk became her coffin” and “The car itself became her funeral hearse.” Busby himself said in a 2004 jailhouse interview, “I just want everyone to know that it wasn't my intention for that lady to die,” adding, “I don't know what happened. I was up for two days smoking crack.” He also said he believed he had wrapped the duct tape in a way that Crane could still breathe and that the plan was to let her go once they were far enough away from Oklahoma.

With the Supreme Court’s action on Thursday, May 14, the legal fight over Busby’s fate narrowed to a single point: whether the courts will ultimately accept Texas's view that he is eligible for execution despite the finding raised by his lawyers and the dissent that he is not.