CONROE, Texas—A man executed more than two decades ago has been identified through DNA testing as the person who killed a Texas girl in 1979, authorities have announced. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said Monday it had spent decades investigating the September 1979 strangulation death of 12-year-old Lesia Michell Jackson. She went missing after going…

PHOENIX—An Arizona prisoner is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in less than three weeks for killing an 8-year-old girl, marking the second condemned man to decline lethal gas since the state refurbished its gas chamber—a method of execution that hasn’t been used in the United States in more than 20 years. Frank Atwood…

McALESTER, Okla.—Oklahoma executed a man Thursday for the 1985 shooting death of an Oklahoma City-area schoolteacher after courts rejected his claim that the state’s lethal injection method would result in unconstitutional pain and suffering. Bigler Stouffer II, 79, received a three-drug lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Stouffer was the first person…

HUNTSVILLE, Texas—A Texas man convicted of fatally beating his 83-year-old great aunt more than two decades ago was executed Wednesday evening without media witnesses present because prison agency officials neglected to notify reporters it was time to carry out the punishment. Quintin Jones received the lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the…