Jackson, Mississippi — Mississippi’s longest-serving death row inmate is scheduled to be executed Wednesday, nearly five decades after kidnapping and killing a bank loan officer’s wife in a violent ransom scheme.
Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, is scheduled for a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. He is one of several Mississippi death row inmates suing the state over its three-drug execution protocol, which they argue is inhumane.
Jordan would be the third person executed in the state in the last decade; the most recent execution occurred in December 2022.
His execution comes just one day after a man was executed in Florida, in what is shaping up to be the most execution-filled year since 2015.
Jordan was sentenced to death in 1976 for murdering and kidnapping Edwina Marter, a mother with two young children, earlier that year. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Jordan is one of 22 people on death row across the country who were sentenced for crimes committed in the 1970s as of the beginning of this year.
Eric Marter, who was 11 years old when his mother was killed, says he, his brother, and his father will not attend the execution, but other family members will.
“It should have happened a long time ago,” he stated about the execution. “I’m not really interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt.”
According to Mississippi Supreme Court records, in January 1976, Jordan called Gulf National Bank in Gulfport, Mississippi, and requested to speak with a loan officer. After being told that Charles Marter could speak with him, he hung up. He then kidnapped Edwina Marter after looking up their home address in the phone book. According to court documents, Jordan took her to a forest and shot her before calling her husband, claiming she was safe and demanding $25,000.
“He needs to be punished,” Eric says. Jordan’s decades-long court process, which included four trials and numerous appeals, has come to an end with his execution. On Monday, the United States Supreme Court denied a petition alleging he was denied due process rights.
“He was never given what the law has entitled him to for a long time, which is a mental health professional who is independent of the prosecution and can assist his defense,” said Jordan’s attorney, Krissy Nobile, director of Mississippi’s Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel. “Because of that, his jury never got to hear about his Vietnam experiences.”
A recent petition to Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves for clemency supported Nobile’s claim. It claims Jordan developed PTSD after serving three consecutive tours in the Vietnam War, which may have played a role 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.”
Eric Marter said he doesn’t believe that argument.
“I understand what he did. He wanted money but couldn’t take her with him. And he—so he did what he did,” he explained.
