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A Mississippi man who had been on death row for nearly five decades for the murder of the wife of a bank loan officer in a ransom scheme was executed Wednesday.
Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran with PTSD, received a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied Jordan’s remaining appeals Wednesday afternoon without comment, and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves had denied Jordan’s request for clemency.
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Jordan visited with family, lawyers and spiritual advisers Wednesday, said Marc McClure, Mississippi State Penitentiary superintendent.
Jordan was sentenced to death in 1976 for kidnapping and killing Edwina Marter, a mother of two young children, earlier that year. He 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 would attend the execution.
“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.”
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In January 1976, Jordan called the Gulf National Bank in Gulfport 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. Jordan took her to a forest and fatally shot her before calling her husband.
He claimed Marter was safe and demanded $25,000. The road to Jordan’s execution included four trials and numerous appeals.
Lawyers for Jordan, who served three tours in Vietnam, argued he never received due process.
“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 Krissy Nobile, the director of Mississippi’s Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, who represented Jordan.
“Because of that, his jury never got to hear about his Vietnam experiences.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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