Mississippi set to execute state’s longest-serving demise row inmate
JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi’s longest-serving demise row inmate is ready to be executed Wednesday, almost 5 many years after he kidnapped and killed a financial institution mortgage officer’s spouse in a violent ransom scheme.
Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress dysfunction, is scheduled to obtain a deadly injection on the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. He’s one in every of a number of folks on Mississippi’s demise row suing the state over its three-drug execution protocol, which they declare is inhumane.
Jordan could be the third particular person executed within the state within the final 10 years; the newest execution was in December 2022.
His execution comes a day after a person was executed in Florida in what’s shaping as much as be a yr with probably the most executions since 2015.
Jordan was sentenced to demise in 1976 for killing and kidnapping Edwina Marter, a mom of two younger kids, earlier that yr. As of the start of the yr, Jordan is one in every of 22 folks throughout the nation sentenced for crimes within the Nineteen Seventies who’re nonetheless on demise row, in accordance with the Dying Penalty Info Heart.
Eric Marter, who was 11 when his mom was killed, mentioned neither he, his brother, nor his father will attend the execution, however different members of the family might be there.
“It ought to have occurred a very long time in the past,” he mentioned of the execution. “I am probably not fascinated by giving him the good thing about the doubt.”
Mississippi Supreme Courtroom information present that in January 1976, Jordan known as the Gulf Nationwide Financial institution in Gulfport, Mississippi, and requested to talk with a mortgage officer. After he was instructed Charles Marter might communicate to him, he hung up. He then seemed up the Marters’ house deal with in a phone e book and kidnapped Edwina Marter. In line with court docket information, Jordan took her to a forest and shot her to demise earlier than calling her husband, claiming she was secure and demanding $25,000.
“He must be punished,” Eric Marter mentioned.
The execution ends Jordan’s decades-long court docket course of that included 4 trials and quite a few appeals. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom rejected a petition that claimed he was denied due course of rights.
“He was by no means given what, for a very long time, the regulation has entitled him to, which is a psychological well being skilled that’s impartial of the prosecution and might help his protection,” mentioned lawyer Krissy Nobile, the director of Mississippi’s Workplace of Capital Submit-Conviction Counsel, who represents Jordan. “Due to that, his jury by no means received to listen to about his Vietnam experiences.”
A current petition asking Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves for clemency echoed Nobile’s declare. It argues Jordan developed PTSD after serving three back-to-back excursions within the Vietnam Warfare, which might have been a think about his crime.
“His warfare service, his warfare trauma, was thought of not related in his homicide trial,” mentioned Franklin Rosenblatt, the president of the Nationwide Institute of Army Justice, who wrote the petition on Jordan’s behalf. “We simply know a lot greater than we did 10 years in the past, and definitely throughout Vietnam, concerning the impact of warfare trauma on the mind and the way that impacts ongoing behaviors.”
Eric Marter mentioned he would not purchase that argument.
“I do know what he did. He needed cash, and he could not take her with him. And he — so he did what he did,” he mentioned.