Richard Gerald Jordan

Richard Gerald Jordan (born May 25, 1946) 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. As of 2022, 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 to his sentence, and because of this, he has been sentenced to death four times.

Jordan was unemployed and desperate for money when he devised a plot to break into the home of a bank executive. He called Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and learned the name of the commercial loan officer, 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.

After Jordan's 1976 guilty verdict and death sentence were vacated because automatic death sentences were found unconstitutional, he was convicted again and re-sentenced to death the next year. After Jordan successfully appealed this sentence on constitutional grounds, he received another death sentence. After this third death sentence was again overturned on appeal, prosecutors offered Jordan a plea deal in which he would plea guilty in exchange for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and the waiver of his future appellate rights. Jordan accepted the plea deal however violated the agreement after he appealed his new sentence on the grounds that the sentence of life imprisonment without parole was unconstitutional in his case since it was not permitted under Mississippi sentencing guidelines at the time of the crime; instead asking courts to reduce his sentence to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole (an available sentence in 1976). Courts found the plea agreement improper, but instead granted a new sentencing hearing, which occurred in 1998 where he was again sentenced to death.

As of February 2024, Jordan remains on Mississippi's death row. His most recent legal objections are related to questions of prosecutorial vindictiveness and whether Mississippi's execution drug cocktail constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Jordan’s execution is scheduled to take place on June 25, 2025.