Texas Resumes Executions After 5-month Delay Due To Pandemic

A Texas inmate has been put to death for fatally shooting an 82-year-old man nearly three decades ago.

That ends a five-month delay of executions in the nation’s busiest capital punishment state because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Billy Joe Wardlow received a lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the 1993 killing of Carl Cole at Cole’s East Texas home. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop the 45-year-old man’s execution.

Wardlow was the first Texas inmate to be executed since Feb. 6. He was the second inmate in the U.S. to be put to death since the country began to reopen.