The longest-serving inmate on Mississippi’s death row faced execution on Wednesday, nearly 50 years after he committed the crime of kidnapping and murdering the wife of a bank loan officer in a ransom plot.
Richard Gerald Jordan, aged 79, a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, received a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary located in Parchman. He was among several death row inmates who challenged the state’s three-drug execution method, arguing it to be inhumane.
Jordan’s execution was the third in the state in the last 10 years; previously the most recent one was carried out in December 2022.
His execution came a day after a man was put to death in Florida, in what is shaping up to be a year with the most executions since 2015.
On Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Jordan’s final appeals without providing any explanation. His death sentence, initially given in 1976, was for the murder and kidnapping of Edwina Marter.
Mississippi Supreme Court records show that in January of that year, Jordan called the Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and asked to speak with a loan officer. After he was told that Charles Marter could speak to him, he hung up. He then looked up the Marters’ home address in a telephone book and kidnapped Edwina Marter.
According to court records, Jordan took her to a forest and fatally shot her before calling her husband, claiming she was safe and demanding $25,000.
Edwina Marter’s husband and two sons had not planned to attend the execution. Eric Marter, who was 11 when his mother was killed, said beforehand that other family members would attend.
“It should have happened a long time ago,” Eric Marter told The Associated Press before the execution. “I’m not really interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt.”
“He needs to be punished,” Marter said.
As of the beginning of the year, Jordan was one of 22 people sentenced in the 1970s who were still on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
His execution ended a decades-long court process that included four trials and numerous appeals. On Monday the Supreme Court rejected a petition that argued he was denied due process rights.
“He was never given what for a long time the law has entitled him to, which is a mental health professional that is independent of the prosecution and can assist his defense,” said lawyer Krissy Nobile, director of Mississippi’s Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, who represented Jordan. “Because of that his jury never got to hear about his Vietnam experiences.”
A recent petition asking Gov. Tate Reeves for clemency echoed Nobile’s claim. It said Jordan suffered severe PTSD after serving three back-to-back tours, which could have been a factor in his crime.
“His war service, his war trauma, was considered not relevant in his murder trial,” said Franklin Rosenblatt, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, who wrote the petition on Jordan’s behalf. “We just know so much more than we did 10 years ago, and certainly during Vietnam, about the effect of war trauma on the brain and how that affects ongoing behaviors.”
Marter said he does not buy that argument: “I know what he did. He wanted money, and he couldn’t take her with him. And he — so he did what he did.”
