Mississippi asks court to set execution date for death row killer for 1976 murder

The Mississippi attorney general is pushing to schedule an execution for 78-year-old death row inmate Richard Gerald Jordan, convicted of the 1976 kidnapping and murder of Edwina Marter.
After the Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed Jordan’s most recent appeal on Tuesday, Attorney General Lynn Fitch wasted no time, filing a request just hours later for the court to set a date for Jordan’s lethal injection.
A Georgia school shooter will not face the death penalty, while a man faced a lethal injection for raping a woman and tying her to a tree. 
“Jordan’s state and federal remedies have been exhausted,” Special Assistant Attorney General Allison Kay Hartman wrote in the filing.
Yet, Jordan’s lawyer, Krissy Nobile, who also heads the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, argued to The Associated Press that the state justices made a mistake by not considering a 2017 U.S.
Supreme Court decision regarding independent mental health experts in death penalty cases.
“We are exploring all federal and state options for Mr. Jordan and will be moving for rehearing in the Mississippi Supreme Court,” Nobile stated.
According to Mississippi Supreme Court documents, Jordan traveled from Louisiana to Gulfport, Mississippi, in January 1976.
He phoned Gulf National Bank, requesting to speak with a loan officer.
When informed that Charles Marter was available, Jordan hung up, located Marter’s home address using a phone book, and then entered the residence by posing as an electric company employee.
Records indicate that Jordan kidnapped Edwina Marter, transported her to a forest, and shot her dead. He then contacted her husband, falsely assuring him of her safety while demanding $25,000.
Jordan has lodged numerous appeals against his death sentence.
The most recent appeal, filed in December 2022 and rejected on Tuesday, claimed that Jordan was denied due process as he should have had a psychiatric examiner appointed solely for his defense rather than a court-appointed psychiatric examiner who provided findings to both the prosecution and his defense.
Mississippi justices stated that Jordan’s attorneys had previously raised this issue in his appeals, and a federal judge ruled that having one court-appointed expert did not infringe upon Jordan’s constitutional rights.
Jordan is among the death row inmates who contested the state’s plan to use a sedative named midazolam as one of the three drugs for executions.
The other drugs included vecuronium bromide, which paralyzes muscles, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate has yet to issue a final decision in the execution drugs case, according to court records.
However, in December 2022, Wingate ruled that he would not prevent the state from executing Thomas Edwin Loden, one of the inmates suing the state over the drugs.
Loden was executed a week later, marking the most recent execution in Mississippi.