Death Row inmates to be executed in Florida, Mississippi
A Mississippi man who has been on Death Row for 49 years is to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday, one of two executions scheduled in the United States this week.
Richard Jordan, 79, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1976 for the murder of Edwina Marter, the wife of a bank executive in the town of Gulfport.
Jordan, a shipyard worker, kidnapped Marter from her home and demanded a $25,000 ransom.
He was apprehended when he went to pick up the money.
Jordan confessed to murdering Marter and led the authorities to her body, which had been hidden in a forest. She had been shot.
Jordan is to be executed at 6:00 pm Central Time (2300 GMT) at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.
One other execution is scheduled to be carried out in the United States this week.
Thomas Gudinas, 51, is to be put to death by lethal injection at 6:00 pm (2200 GMT) on Tuesday at the Florida State Prison in Raiford.
Gudinas was sentenced to death in 1995 for the murder of Michelle McGrath, who was last seen leaving a bar in the city of Orlando in the early hours.
McGrath's battered body was found the next day and Gudinas was arrested shortly afterwards.
Florida has carried out more executions -- six -- than any other US state so far this year.
The execution in Mississippi will be the first in the southern state since December 2022.
There have been 23 executions in the United States this year: 18 by lethal injection, two by firing squad and three by nitrogen hypoxia, which involves pumping nitrogen gas into a facemask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.
The use of nitrogen gas as an execution method has been denounced by UN experts as cruel and inhumane.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others -- California, Oregon and Pennsylvania -- have moratoriums in place.
President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and called on his first day in office for an expansion of its use "for the vilest crimes."
cl/sms
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
25 minutes ago
- USA Today
Cold-blooded killer or traumatized Vietnam vet? Inmate's psyche debated ahead of execution
Richard Jordan is arguing that jurors never got to hear about the trauma he suffered after three combat tours in the Vietnam War. His victim's son is lamenting the five decades the case has taken. Did Richard Jordan commit murder because of post-traumatic stress disorder from three combat tours in the Vietnam War? Or is he simply a cold-blooded killer? That question is at the heart of Jordan's arguments against his imminent execution in Mississippi on Wednesday, June 25 − six months shy of 50 years since he kidnapped and killed 36-year-old Edwina Marter, a stay-at-home mother of two sons. Jordan shot Marter in the back of the head before her banker husband paid a $25,000 ransom for her return on Jan. 12, 1976. "Like other veterans, Vietnam forever changed Richard" and left him "a traumatized man," according to his petition for clemency filed on June 16, which says he served three combat tours for a combined 33 months, often in the perilous position as a helicopter gunner, earning him various medals and an honorable discharge. Now as Mississippi's oldest inmate on death row at the age of 79, he has mentored younger prisoners, helped quell violent breakouts, and worked with banks to help prevent their employees from becoming targets like Marter, his petition says. But at Jordan's trial in 1976, prosecutors told jurors to consider how fervently Jordan demanded a ransom for Marter's safe return even after he had shot her dead. "Did you notice how cool and calculated, cold?" then-Jackson County District Attorney Albert Necaise said, according to an archived report in the Daily Herald in Biloxi. "He was the judge, he was the jury . . . and he was also her executioner." As Jordan's execution by lethal injection approaches, USA TODAY is looking back at the case, the dramatic murder trial, and whether Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves has answered the inmate's request for a 15-minute meeting to hear him out. Discover WITNESS: Access our exclusive collection of true crime stories, podcasts, videos and more. Edwina Marter's kidnapping and murder On Jan. 12, 1976, Edwina Marter was at home in Mississippi City with one of her two sons, 3-year-old Kevin, while her 10-year-old son Eric was in school, according to court records. Richard Jordan showed up and kidnapped Marter as Kevin slept. Jordan had found out that her husband, Charles Marter, was an executive at Gulf National Bank and decided to target the couple for ransom money, court records say. Jordan took Edwina Marter about 35 miles away to a deserted area of the DeSoto National Forest, where prosecutors said he executed her by shooting a bullet into the back of her head as she knelt. Jordan maintained that the fatal bullet was supposed to be a warning shot when she ran away, which prosecutors called a "cock-and-bull story." After killing Edwina, Jordan called Charles Marter, told him that his wife was alive and well and that it would cost him $25,000 to get her back, court records say. A half dozen law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, deployed when Marter immediately reported the kidnapping, and area journalists made a rare agreement for nearly 24 hours of news silence to allow the frantic husband to make a money drop, according to reporting in the Daily Herald. After Jordan directed Marter to a number of futile stops at various locations, the money was eventually left under a jacket by the side of a road, where Jordan retrieved it as authorities watched undetected. A high-speed chase ensued, which included officers hitting Jordan's car with multiple bullets. Jordan made a brief escape but was later arrested after being spotted in the back of a taxi at a police roadblock. Richard Jordan has been sentenced to death 4 times Jordan's dramatic first trial dominated local newspaper headlines as prosecutors painted a vivid picture for the jurors who would find him guilty. District Attorney Necaise said that Jordan's execution would be more humane than Edwina Marter's murder, pointing out that his family "will not have to run up and down the road looking for his body" as hers did, according to the Herald. "The body will be turned over to them," Necaise continued. "It will not be left for the birds of the air and the beasts of the fields to feast upon." Jordan's court-appointed defense attorney, Earl Denham, had an unusual closing statement, telling jurors that the case had been "a nightmare" for him and said his client was a sociopath, the Herald reported. "He is calm and he is quiet and he has never shown one iota of emotion to me about anything," Denham said. "He is sick if he is anything." Necaise later dismissed that: "I say he is not a sick man, I say he is a greedy man." Jordan was sentenced to death after that trial in 1976 but that was later vacated over a change in death penalty law, and he was again tried, convicted and sentenced to death in 1977. An appeals court later vacated that sentence over unconstitutional penalty-phase instructions, but Jordan again got the death penalty at a 1983 resentencing. That, too, was later vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Jordan reached an agreement with prosecutors for a life sentence. Then in 1994, the Supreme Court of Mississippi invalidated the agreement, saying it shouldn't have been an option. Jordan was sentenced to death for the fourth time in 1998. Richard Jordan's PTSD never presented to jury At no point during Jordan's legal proceedings did a jury get to hear about PTSD from his Vietnam service in the 1st Calvary Division from 1966 to 1969, starting when he was 18 years old, according to his clemency petition. As a door gunner, he protected ground troops by providing "defensive and suppressive fire" with M60 machine guns mounted onto the cargo doors of helicopters, according to one of Jordan's filings in the U.S. Supreme Court. He was "trained to kill on sight," the filing said. Jordan once fired on a small hut suspected of shooting down a U.S. helicopter and later learned that women and children were among the dead inside, a revelation that still haunts him even though his actions were found to be legal, the clemency petition says. His base, Phu Bai near Huế in south Vietnam, was attacked in "one of the bloodiest battles during the 1968 Tet Offensive," during which he "was under constant threat of being killed," the petition says. After nearly three years at war, Jordan struggled mentally and emotionally back home in Mississippi and 'experienced periods of hypervigilance, suspicion of strangers, and emotional numbness," according to the filing, which argues that a death sentence is improper. "Had the jury heard this critical information, Richard might not have been sentenced to death," according to his clemency petition, which seeks a meeting between Jordan and Gov. Tate Reeves. Neither Tate's office nor the Mississippi Attorney General's Office responded to requests for comment for this story, including whether the governor would take the meeting. In a recent court filing, the state stands behind Jordan's death sentence and execution, calling his claims "baseless." He "executed a young mother after kidnapping her to extort money from her husband. A jury convicted him of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death nearly three decades ago," the state told the Supreme Court. Jordan's attorneys have been filing a number of other legal arguments fighting the execution, including a challenge over the drugs used in lethal-injection executions. Victim's son laments length of court cases Edwina Marter's now 59-year-old son, Eric Marter, told USA TODAY that his family never bought Jordan's claims that he accidentally shot Edwina and they certainly aren't buying his arguments about PTSD. "It doesn't surprise me that you want to try to play whatever game you can so they don't put you to death," he said. "He's kind of playing the military card and seeing if that's going to help him out." He said he never heard about Jordan's Vietnam service until recently and pointed to how well-planned the crime was. "To say that you've got a mental problem, I'm not really buying it." He doesn't have very many memories of his mom anymore, and his brother has none, though they've heard some great family stories. His Aunt Norma told the boys about how when she and Edwina were younger, they'd dress up in their nicest clothes, put on makeup and go crash wedding receptions. "She liked to have fun," he said. Edwina not only missed out on his and his brother's childhoods, but also the lives of three grandchildren and a great grandchild, he said. About the execution, he said the family has been frustrated decades of delays. They're ready for it to be over with. "It's been way, way too long." More details about the execution Jordan is set to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. CT on Wednesday, June 25, at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. If Jordan's execution moves forward, he will be the 25th inmate executed in the U.S. this year, matching the amount of executions conducted during all of last year. The U.S. has previously executed combat veterans, most recently on May 1, when Florida executed Jeffrey Hutchinson, who served in the Gulf War. Another Vietnam veteran, Herbert Richardson, was executed in Alabama in 1989, and was depicted in the 2019 film "Just Mercy." Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.
3 hours ago
Mississippi set to execute state's longest-serving death row inmate
JACKSON, Miss. -- Mississippi's longest-serving death row inmate is set to be executed Wednesday nearly five decades after he kidnapped and killed a bank loan officer's wife in a violent ransom scheme. Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. He is one of several people on Mississippi's death row suing the state over its three-drug execution protocol, which they claim is inhumane. Jordan would be the third person executed in the state in the last 10 years; the most recent execution was in December 2022. His execution comes a day after a man was executed in Florida in what is shaping up to be a year with the most executions since 2015. Jordan was sentenced to death in 1976 for killing and kidnapping Edwina Marter, a mother of two young children, earlier that year. As of the beginning of the year, Jordan is one of 22 people across the country sentenced for crimes in the 1970s who are still on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Eric Marter, who was 11 when his mother was killed, said neither he, his brother, nor his father will attend the execution, but other family members will be there. 'It should have happened a long time ago,' he said of the execution. 'I'm not really interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt.' Mississippi Supreme Court records show that in January 1976, Jordan called the Gulf National Bank in Gulfport, Mississippi, and asked to speak with a loan officer. After he was told 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 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 ends Jordan's decades-long court process that included four trials and numerous appeals. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition that claimed 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, the director of Mississippi's Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, who represents Jordan. 'Because of that, his jury never got to hear about his Vietnam experiences.' A recent petition asking Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves for clemency echoed Nobile's claim. It argues Jordan developed PTSD after serving three back-to-back tours in the Vietnam War, 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, the 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 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,' he said.
Washington Post
15 hours ago
- Washington Post
UN peacekeeper killed in attack by armed men in Central African Republic
DAKAR, Senegal — A United Nations peacekeeper was killed during an attack by armed men in Central African Republic , the UN said on Tuesday as the Security Council expressed concerns over growing attacks against peacekeepers in the country. A Zambian peacekeeper was killed Friday when suspected Sudanese armed groups attacked a U.N. peacekeeping patrol team close to the country's northern border with Sudan in the village of Am-Sissia 1, according to a statement from the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.
