In Texas, condemned prisoner Billy Joe Wardlow was pronounced dead at 6:52 p.m. local time Wednesday, 24 minutes after prison officials strapped him to a gurney and injected him with a massive dose of the sedative pentobarbital. It was Texas’s first execution since the start of the pandemic. Wardlow’s killing came hours after the U.S. Supreme Court refused his petition for a stay of execution. Wardlow was convicted of capital murder after a botched robbery in 1993, when he was just 18 years old. His lawyers argued he was too young to receive the death penalty.