Jackson, Mississippi (AP) – Mississippi's longest death row inmate will be executed Wednesday after he kidnapped and killed the wife of a bank loan official.
Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran with PTSD, plans to receive a fatal injection in a Mississippi prison in Patchman. He is one of several people on Mississippi’s death row, asking the state to sue the state for its three poisons enforcement program, which they claim is inhumane.
Jordan will be the third person to be executed in the state in the past 10 years; the most recent execution was in December 2022.
His execution came on the day when a man was executed everywhere in Florida, the most since 2015.
Jordan was sentenced to death in 1976 for killing and kidnapping of his mother of two earlier that year. As of the beginning of this year, Jordan was one of 22 people still sentenced to crimes in death row in the 1970s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Eric Marter, who was 11 years old when his mother was killed, said he, neither his brother nor his father would participate in the execution, but other family members would be there.
“It should have happened a long time ago,” he said of the execution. “I'm not interested in the benefits of giving him doubt.”
In January 1976, Jordan called Mississippi Gulf of Mexico National Bank and asked to speak with a loan official, according to records from the Mississippi Supreme Court. He hung up after he was told that Charles Marter could speak to him. He then searched Marters' home address in the phone book and kidnapped Edwina Marter. According to court records, Jordan took her to the forest and shot her to death before calling her husband, claiming she was safe and demanding $25,000.
“He needs to be punished,” Eric Marter said.
The execution ended Jordan's decades-long court process, which included four trials and many appeals. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition claiming he was denied due process rights.
“For a long time, he has never had a legal right for a long time, a mental health expert who can help his defense,” said Krissy Nobile, director of the Post-Conviction Lawyer Office of Mississippi Capital, who represents Jordan. “So his jury has never heard of his Vietnam experience.”
A recent petition called for leniency by Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, responding to Nobill's claim. It believes Jordan developed PTSD after three back-to-back tours in the Vietnam War, which could be a factor in his crime.
“His war service, war trauma is considered to be unrelated to his murder,” said Franklin Rosenblatt, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, who wrote a petition on behalf of Jordan. “We know a lot more than 10 years ago (in Vietnam surely) about the impact of war trauma on the brain and how it affects ongoing behavior.”
Eric Marter said he doesn't buy that argument.
He said: “I know what he did. He wanted money, he couldn't take her. He-so he did what he did.”
