The Mississippi began to execute the longest detainee in the corridor of the state

Jackson, Miss. – The oldest detainee of the death prisoners of Mississippi should be executed on Wednesday, almost five decades after kidnapped and killed the woman of a bank loan agent in a violent ransom program.

Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran who suffers from a post-traumatic stress disorder, should receive a lethal injection to the penitentiary of the state of the Mississippi at Parchman. He is one of the many people in the corridor of the death of the Mississippi who pursues the state on his execution protocol with three drugs, which, according to them, is inhuman.

Jordan would be the third person executed in the state in the past 10 years; The most recent execution took place in December 2022.

Its execution occurs one day after a man was executed in Florida in what announces as a year with the most executions since 2015.

Jordan was sentenced to death in 1976 for killing and kidnapped Edwina Marter, mother of two young children, earlier this year. Since the start of the year, Jordan has been one of the 22 people across the country convicted of crimes in the 1970s who are still in the death corridor, according to the Death Pinnaly Information Center.

Eric Marter, who was 11 years old, when his mother was killed, said that neither he, his brother, nor his father attended the execution, but other family members will be there.

“It should have happened a long time ago,” he said about the execution. “I am not really interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt.”

The files of the Supreme Court of Mississippi show that in January 1976, Jordan called the Gulfport National Bank in Gulfport, Mississippi, and asked to speak with a loan agent. After he was told that Charles Marter could speak to him, he hung up. He then seeked the address of reception of the Marrs in a telephone directory and Kidnappé Edwina Marter. According to the judicial archives, Jordan took her to a forest and pulled her to death before calling her husband, saying that she was safe and demanding $ 25,000.

“He must be punished,” said Eric Marter.

The execution ends the judicial process of Jordan which included four lawsuits and many calls. On Monday, the United States Supreme Court rejected a petition which said it was refused rights to regular procedure.

“We have never given him what, for a long time, the law has the right to, who is a mental health professional independent of the accusation and can help his defense,” said lawyer Krissy Nobile, director of the Mississippi Capital Office, who represents Jordan. “Because of this, his jury has never heard of his experiences from Vietnam.”

A recent petition asking the Governor of Mississippi Tate Reeves for Clémence echoed Nobile’s complaint. He argues that Jordan developed the SSPT after making three consecutive tours in the Vietnam War, which could have been a factor in his crime.

“His war service, his war trauma, was not considered relevant in his trial for murder,” said Franklin Rosenblatt, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, who wrote the petition on behalf of Jordan. “We know much more than 10 years ago, and certainly during Vietnam, on the effect of war trauma on the brain and how it affects the ongoing behaviors.”

Eric Marter said he did not buy this argument.

“I know what he did. He wanted money, and he couldn’t take him with him. And he-then he did what he did,” he said.