For fifty years, he has been waiting in the halls of death. Richard Gerald Jordan, the inmate of the death corridor that has fulfilled the longest sentence in the American state of the Mississippi, will be executed this Wednesday, June 25, says the US press. This Vietnam veteran, now 79 years old, was sentenced in 1976 for the kidnapping and murder of Edwina Marter, wife of a banking agent who wanted to ask for a ransom.
For five decades, Richard Gerald Jordan has presented several appeals against his death sentence. The last one was rejected last October, according to Associated Press. “After careful thought, the court believes that Jordan has exhausted all state and federal appeals in order to fix an execution,” he explained in the judicial decision.
According to his lawyer, Krissy Nobile, “never benefited from what the law has given him for a long time, namely, a mental health professional independent of the accusation and capable of helping him in his defense.” According to ABC News, she talks about Vietnam’s trauma about Richard Gerald Jordan, who has developed posttraumatic stress syndrome that could have contributed to her crime.
A petition demands clemency
“His military service and war trauma were not considered relevant during his judgment for murder,” explains Franklin Rosenblatt, president of the National Military Justice Institute, at the origin of a petition asking for mercy for the death corridor.
And to add: “We know more than ten years ago and certainly during the Vietnam War, about the effect of war trauma on the brain and its consequences on behavior.”
The detainee must receive a lethal injection in Mississippi’s state prison, in Parking. Like other death sentences, Richard Gerald Jordan denounces the execution protocol in three substances, considered inhuman. In total, about twenty detainees are waiting in the halls of death, such as him, to be executed for crimes committed in the 1970s, he emphasizes ABC’s news.
Source: BFM TV
