Richard Gerald Jordan

Richard Gerald Jordan (born May 25, 1946[1]) is an American man on death row in Mississippi for the 1976 murder of 34-year-old Edwina Marter, the wife of a bank executive. Jordan is the state's oldest and longest-serving death row inmate. Though he admitted to the crime and his guilt has never been seriously called into question, Jordan has filed multiple successful legal challenges of his sentence, and because of this, he has been sentenced to death four times.

Richard Gerald Jordan
Born (1946-05-25) May 25, 1946
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
OccupationShipyard worker
Criminal statusOn death row for murder
Imprisoned atMississippi State Penitentiary

Jordan said that he was unemployed and desperate for money when he called Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and asked for the name of the commercial loan officer. When he learned that the man's name was Chuck Marter, he looked up the man's address in a telephone directory, then drove to the home and kidnapped Edwina Marter. He fatally shot her in the De Soto National Forest before calling her husband and attempting to collect ransom money from him.

Jordan's 1977 guilty verdict and death sentence were vacated because automatic death sentences were found unconstitutional. He was convicted again and re-sentenced to death. After Jordan successfully appealed his next two death sentences based on other constitutional issues, prosecutors gave him a plea deal involving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Jordan challenged the propriety of this sentence, and he was given a new sentencing hearing where he received a death sentence again. His most recent legal objections are related to questions of prosecutorial vindictiveness and whether Mississippi's execution drug cocktail constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Early life

Jordan was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Mr. and Mrs. Homer H. Jordan.[2][3] He grew up nearby in Petal.[2][4] A neighbor later said that Jordan had a reputation as a good person through his school days.[5] After graduating from Petal High School, Jordan spent four or five years in the army, serving in the Vietnam War. By the mid-1970s, Jordan was married with three children. After his military discharge, he worked in Louisiana while his wife maintained their home in Hattiesburg. He spent a year managing a fertilizer plant and two or three months working in a Morgan City shipyard.[3]

By January 1976, Jordan became desperate for money, and he planned to kidnap someone from a wealthy family and demand ransom money. He decided to come to Gulfport, Mississippi, to carry this out. On his way out of Louisiana, Jordan stopped at a pawn shop in Baton Rouge and traded in his 16-gauge shotgun for a .38 caliber pistol.[2] He told his parents that he was going to take a physical to obtain a position on an offshore oil rig.[3]

Kidnapping and murder of Edwina Marter

After spending a few days learning his way around Gulfport, Jordan decided to execute his plot. He called the Gulf National Bank from a payphone and asked to speak to the person in charge of issuing commercial loans. The bank representative told him that Charles "Chuck" Marter could help him. There was a Gulfport telephone directory in the phone booth, so Jordan hung up the phone and looked up Marter's address.[2] On January 12, 1976, Jordan drove to Marter's home pretending to be an electric company worker who needed to check circuit breakers. He kidnapped Marter's wife, Edwina, and left their three-year-old son asleep in the house. Chuck Marter was at work, and the couple's other son, age nine, was at catechism class at the time.[6]

Jordan forced Edwina into his car and made her drive into the De Soto National Forest. They got out of Jordan's vehicle and Jordan fatally shot her once in the head.[6] The circumstances behind Edwina's shooting were contested. Jordan said he was planning to hold Edwina for ransom but that he fired a single shot when she started to run away from him. He said he intended for the shot to go over Edwina's head. The state later said the evidence showed that Edwina was shot at close range while in a kneeling position.[6]

Ransom attempts and capture

After killing Edwina, Jordan watched Death Wish at a nearby movie theater.[7] He then called Chuck Marter to demand $50,000 in ransom, telling him that Edwina was still alive.[7] The men spoke again that evening and decided on the exact location where Marter would drop off the money. Marter drove to the spot that night, trailed by sheriff's deputies. Jordan had set up the initial meeting as a test; he was monitoring the location from the De Soto National Forest, and he noticed the law enforcement presence right away. Jordan called Marter the next day and accused him of trying to "pull a fast one". Jordan gave Marter a new plan for dropping off the money, but he reduced his ransom demand to $25,000. He told Marter to make several turns before getting on the freeway so that the police would not be able to keep up with him.[2]

Marter left the cash at a spot near Interstate 10 and Canal Road in Gulfport at 9:00 am on January 13. An FBI agent and a Harrison County sheriff's deputy were waiting in a pickup truck near the site, and when Jordan showed up to retrieve the money, they attempted to move in on him. Jordan ran the sheriff's office vehicle into a ditch and kept driving even when shots were fired at his car. The sheriff's deputy involved in the chase was Larkin I. Smith, who later became the Harrison County sheriff and then a U.S. congressman.[2]

Jordan evaded law enforcement and abandoned his car, but a Gulfport police officer found him in a taxi at about 1:00 pm the same day, arrested him, and recovered most of the ransom money.[8] Jordan told police officers that he had killed Edwina, and he took them to the body and the murder weapon.[6] During a mental health evaluation after his arrest, Jordan told a psychiatrist that an accomplice actually shot Marter and then left before Jordan carried out the ransom scheme. However, Jordan's attorneys found his recollections to be distorted and inconsistent, and they did not use this claim in his defense.[9]

First trial

In July 1976, Jordan went on trial for Marter's kidnapping and murder. He was granted a change of venue from Harrison County to Jackson County because of concerns that local news coverage of the crime might make it difficult to impanel an impartial jury in Harrison County. The trial was held in Pascagoula; jury selection was held on July 19.[10] The trial lasted three days, and prosecutors called 24 witnesses; no one testified for the defense. The jury deliberated for four hours before returning a guilty verdict on a capital murder charge on the evening of July 21, 1976.[11]

At the time, capital murder carried an automatic death sentence in Mississippi, and this sentence was handed down to Jordan. However, there was already a case before the Supreme Court of Mississippi in which the court was expected to rule automatic death sentences unconstitutional. District attorney Albert Necaise and assistant district attorney Joe Sam Owen had anticipated this ruling before Jordan's sentencing, and they considered entering a motion for a trial with a separate punishment hearing. However, they could find no basis in Mississippi law for such a motion.[11]

Early appeals

Later that year, the state supreme court did hold that automatic death sentences constituted cruel and unusual punishment, and Jordan received a new trial.[12] A second trial began in Pascagoula in late February 1977, this time with separate phases to determine guilt or innocence and to decide on punishment. Jordan was found guilty of murder on March 2, 1977, and he was sentenced to death that evening. At one point during the sentencing deliberations, the jury told the judge that one juror was not in favor of giving Jordan the death penalty. They continued deliberating and unanimously handed down the death sentence.[5]

In the early 1980s, Jordan challenged the death sentence from his second trial on the grounds of improper jury instructions. During closing arguments of that second trial, when Owen was discussing aggravating circumstances that supported a capital murder conviction, he told jurors that "each of you have to determine what is an aggravating circumstance". In August 1982, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Supreme Court precedent required jurors to be given specific guidance on objective standards for aggravating circumstances.[12] The Fifth Circuit vacated Jordan's death sentence and ordered that a new sentencing hearing be held in Jackson County Circuit Court.[13]

In the spring of 1983, a few weeks before Jordan's next sentencing hearing, his primary attorney, Earl Denham, withdrew from his case because he was planning to take a sabbatical from law practice. Gulfport attorney Joseph Hudson was appointed to replace him, and attorney Earl Stegall continued to assist in Jordan's defense.[14] Owen was engaged in private practice by this time, but he agreed to act as a special prosecutor at the request of the Marter family.[12] Jordan testified at this hearing, explaining that desperation led him to the crime, as he owed money for a car, a boat, department store credit, and other expenses. The defense also called relatives and friends of Jordan as well as a death row guard.[15] Jordan received another death sentence.[12]

Jordan's third death sentence was vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986 because he had been barred from introducing mitigating testimony related to his good behavior in prison.[16] Specifically, Jordan's team had attempted to introduce testimony that while in prison he devised a technique for generating electricity using wind tunnels.[17] The next year, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a new sentencing hearing.[18]

Plea deal and another death sentence

In 1991, in lieu of pursuing a fourth death sentence, the Harrison County district attorney offered a plea deal: Jordan would receive life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as long as he agreed not to challenge his sentence anymore. Jordan agreed to the deal and was sentenced accordingly. Later, Jordan discovered that the plea deal had been improper, as life without parole sentences in Mississippi could only be issued to habitual offenders in 1991.[19] Owen later said that he disagreed with the DA's decision to offer the plea deal because he knew the sentence would be improper.[7] Mississippi law changed in 1994 to allow life without parole sentences for any capital offense. By challenging the life without parole sentence, Jordan hoped that it would simply be modified to life with parole. Instead, the Supreme Court vacated the sentence, giving Jordan a new sentencing hearing.[12][19]

Realizing that he was again in jeopardy of a death sentence, Jordan asked Owen for the original life without parole plea deal. Owen refused to offer another plea deal, saying Jordan had violated the first one by challenging his sentence. At the next sentencing hearing in April 1998, Owen pursued the death penalty. Jurors deliberated for 35 minutes before handing down a death sentence. The jury foreman referred to the decision as a "no brainer" and commented on Jordan's apparent lack of remorse and the 22 years that had elapsed since the initial verdict.[12][20]

Jordan later appealed his death sentence on the grounds that prosecutorial vindictiveness led Owen to pursue the death penalty when he became irritated that Jordan had challenged his life sentence. To pursue this due process appeal, Jordan needed a certificate of appealability (COA), but the district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant him one. The Fifth Circuit said that Jordan had failed to prove that Owen was vindictive, but Supreme Court precedent does not require the defendant to prove the underlying merits of the case before obtaining a COA. The issue went to the Supreme Court, which ruled against Jordan in 2015; justice Sonia Sotomayor was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan on a dissenting opinion that criticized the other justices for ruling on the underlying merits rather than issuing a COA.[12]

Challenges to lethal injection procedure

Jordan was initially sentenced to die in Mississippi's gas chamber, but this execution method came into question following the 1983 execution of Jimmy Lee Gray for sodomy and murder of a three-year-old girl. Eight minutes into Gray's execution, with Gray's body still heaving and his head repeatedly striking a pole behind his chair, observers were asked to step out of the witness room.[21] State legislation made lethal injection the execution method for all offenders sentenced after April 1984. Offenders already on death row were grandfathered in to execution by gas chamber until 1998, when Mississippi's gas chamber was decommissioned.[22]

By the early 2010s, states began to have difficulty obtaining certain lethal injection drugs. Many of these drugs were manufactured by companies based in Europe, where there is strong anti-death penalty sentiment, and these companies were reluctant to be associated with executions. Supply and demand was also a large part of the issue; hospitals were using newer anesthetic agents far more often than the older drugs traditionally used in executions (such as the fast-acting barbiturates sodium thiopental and pentobarbital). By February 2011, the last American manufacturer of sodium thiopental stopped selling the drug, and the only American manufacturer of pentobarbital was asking states not to use it for executions.[23]

Death penalty legislation in Mississippi required the use of a fast-acting barbiturate or similar drug in the execution cocktail, and the state had used pentobarbital for this purpose until they could no longer obtain it. When the state started planning to use alternative drugs, death row inmates challenged the use of these drugs in court, and this effectively brought executions to a halt in 2012. Later, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) made plans to utilize compounding (the preparation of a drug from raw ingredients) to produce pentobarbital or another sedative, midazolam. MDOC was storing the raw ingredients for pentobarbital at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. In August 2015, in response to a lawsuit filed on behalf of Jordan and another death row inmate, a federal district judge issued an injunction blocking MDOC's use of compounded drugs in executions. Before this ruling, the state's attorney general, Jim Hood, had asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to issue an execution date for Jordan.[24]

The state passed a new death penalty statute in 2017 requiring a new three-drug execution cocktail: a sedative or anesthetic that can render a person unconscious; a muscle paralytic like vecuronium; and potassium chloride or a similar drug. Under the 2017 statute, alternative execution methods may be considered in Mississippi if lethal injection is deemed unconstitutional or is otherwise unfeasible; these include nitrogen asphyxiation, the electric chair, and firing squad.[25]

Shortly after the 2017 changes to the death penalty statute, Jordan challenged the state's use of midazolam on the grounds that it does not render a person unconscious.[26] The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled 7–2 to deny Jordan a hearing on the matter, but he had an ongoing federal court challenge against MDOC's use of midazolam.[27]

In November 2021, in Mississippi's first execution since 2012, the state used midazolam, vecuronium, and potassium chloride to execute David Neal Cox. In a statement issued before that execution, MDOC Commissioner Burl Cain refused to say where the department obtained the execution drugs.[28]

See also

References
  1. "Offender Data Sheet: Richard G. Jordan" (PDF). Mississippi Department of Corrections. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 22, 2022. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  2. Pender, Geoff (June 17, 2001). "How Jordan planned abduction, murder". Sun Herald (Biloxi). Archived from the original on April 2, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  3. "Local man held in Gulf Coast kidnap-slaying". Hattiesburg American. January 14, 1976. p. 1. Archived from the original on April 8, 2022. Retrieved April 8, 2022.
  4. Hood, Orley (August 18, 2001). "Watergate's Colson tries to bring hope". Clarion-Ledger. Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  5. Hines, Regina (March 3, 1977). "Richard Gerald Jordan sentenced to death". The Daily Herald (Biloxi). Archived from the original on April 13, 2022. Retrieved April 13, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. Vargas, Ramon Antonio (August 9, 2015). "Family of Metairie woman, murdered in Mississippi in 1976, hopes execution of killer will finally take place". NOLA.com. Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  7. Baker, Margaret (August 9, 2015). "Prosecutor: Killer 'had every opportunity to save his life'". Sun Herald (Biloxi). Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  8. Leggett, Dot (January 14, 1976). "Former Hattiesburg man accused in murder-kidnap of bank official's wife". The Daily Herald (Biloxi). Archived from the original on April 2, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  9. Arcell, Larry (July 23, 1976). "Jordan told doctor he had an accomplice". South Mississippi Sun. pp. A1–A4. Archived from the original on April 13, 2022. Retrieved April 13, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  10. "Attorneys to begin empaneling jury for Jordan murder trial". Hattiesburg American. Associated Press. July 19, 1976. Archived from the original on April 13, 2022. Retrieved April 13, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. Meece, Gary (July 22, 1976). "Jordan gets death for kidnap, murder". The Daily Herald (Biloxi). Archived from the original on April 10, 2022. Retrieved April 10, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  12. Stern, Mark Joseph (July 2, 2015). "Try, try again". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on March 31, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  13. McIlwain, Joy (August 15, 1982). "Mississippi's 32 Death Row residents know about killing". The Clarion-Ledger. p. 1F. Archived from the original on April 13, 2022. Retrieved April 13, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  14. Hines, Regina (January 12, 1983). "Jordan resentencing delayed, attorney withdraws from case". The Daily Herald. Archived from the original on April 17, 2022. Retrieved April 16, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  15. Broadus, Marianne (April 29, 1983). "Jordan says need for money led to slaying". The Sun (Biloxi). Archived from the original on April 13, 2022. Retrieved April 13, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  16. Deibel, Mary (May 6, 1986). "Court rejects plea of patrolman's slayer". The Commercial Appeal. Archived from the original on April 17, 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2022.
  17. "Jordan loses death appeal". Kingsport Times-News. UPI. January 31, 1985.
  18. "Three on death row to get new hearings". The Clarksdale Press Register. Associated Press. September 24, 1987. Archived from the original on April 17, 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2022.
  19. Apel, Therese (July 29, 2015). "AG requests August execution date for Richard Gerald Jordan". The Clarion-Ledger. Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  20. Lacour, Greg (April 25, 1998). "Jordan gets death sentence again". Sun Herald (Biloxi). Archived from the original on April 2, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  21. Lohwasser, Dan (September 2, 1983). "Jimmy Lee Gray died gasping and choking in the..." UPI. Archived from the original on April 3, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  22. Cabana, Donald. "The History of Capital Punishment in Mississippi: An Overview". Mississippi History Now. Archived from the original on January 5, 2022. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  23. Grissom, Brandi (February 6, 2011). "A drug used in executions becomes very hard to get". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 4, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  24. Gates, Jimmie E. (August 26, 2015). "Judge halts death penalty". Clarion-Ledger. Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  25. "House Bill 638". Mississippi Legislature. Archived from the original on August 7, 2021. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  26. Dreher, Arielle (August 16, 2017). "State's longest-sitting death row inmate challenges death penalty drug". Jackson Free Press. Archived from the original on March 31, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  27. Amy, Jeff (December 8, 2018). "Mississippi justices reject challenges over execution drug". The Commercial Dispatch. Archived from the original on 2022-04-07. Retrieved 2022-04-07.
  28. "Stepdaughter who was raped while mother died among scheduled witnesses during execution of killer — Mississippi's first in 9 years". Magnolia State Live. November 17, 2021. Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
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