MS prisoner Richard Jordan awaits responses from federal court, governor before execution

• Mississippi death row inmate Richard Jordan’s execution is scheduled for June 25th, amidst legal challenges to the state’s three-drug protocol.
• Jordan’s attorneys argue for the use of Pentobarbital, citing its effectiveness and availability due to a Trump-era executive order.
• Jordan’s clemency petition and request to meet with Governor Reeves are pending.

The quest to halt the execution of Mississippi prisoner Richard Jordan is speeding up as his execution date nears.

Jordan, at 79 is Mississippi’s oldest prisoner on death row and is the longest-serving. He’s been on death row since 1977, after he was convicted of capital murder in the kidnapping and murder of Edwina Marter, a Gulfport bank executive’s wife and mother of two young sons.

He is scheduled for execution on Wednesday, June 25, at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

On Monday, June 16, Attorney General Lynn Fitch sent a letter as promised to U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate in response to a question he posed during a hearing Saturday, June 14, at the Thad Cochran Federal Courthouse in Jackson.

Wingate said Mississippi does not have a protocol in writing for the possibility of a prisoner injected with the sedative Midazolam responding to stimulation during a consciousness test conducted four minutes after the drug is administered.

If a prisoner responds to the consciousness test, the other two parts of the three-drug process of execution should not be given to the person, Jordan’s attorney James Craig said. He pointed out that the consciousness test was administered much sooner than four minutes for prisoners David Cox and Thomas Loden, who were executed in 2021 and 2022, and it is not clear whether they would have responded to pain after the second drug, a paralytic, was administered.

At the Saturday hearing, attorneys from Fitch’s office said the Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain would have the option to restart the process, which means giving the prisoner, in this instance, Jordan, another dose of 500 mg of Midazolam and doing another consciousness test or halt the execution.

But Wingate said the protocol wasn’t in writing and asked, before he wrote his opinion, if the state and Jordan would be willing to stop the execution until he could decide what should happen next.

Jordan and his attorneys agreed, but Wilson Minor, representing the state at the hearing, said he did not know if his client would be amenable to calling Judge Wingate in the event the consciousness test failed since there was no written protocol.

In Fitch’s letter to Wingate, filed Monday morning, she said the state indeed has a protocol that says Cain should restart the process. If the consciousness test fails a second time, he should halt the process and the court would decide what happens next. She did not specify which court.

“This is the proper course of action,” Fitch wrote. “The State’s execution protocol, like the ‘gold standard’ Oklahoma execution protocol, gives the Commissioner the discretion to restart the execution, and he should be allowed to exercise that discretion, and all other discretion under the State’s execution protocol.”

The hearing was in response to a lawsuit Jordan and others filed in 2015 challenging the three-drug protocol, saying it violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Jordan and his co-plaintiffs say chemical executions using Pentobarbital is more effective and assures a pain-free execution.

Pentobarbital has been in short supply and difficult to obtain since 2021, but on Jan. 20, the first day of President Donald Trump’s first day of his second term, he issued an executive order, Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety, to guarantee states access to the drugs needed to carry out executions.

Craig filed a letter in response to Fitch’s, saying Fitch did not directly answer Wingate’s question, but basicially said Cain should be allowed to exercise sole discretion over the execution process.

“Somewhat buried in this language is the fact that the Commissioner’s answer to the Court’s question is ‘No,’” Craig wrote. “Instead, the Commissioner insists that the MDOC Protocol gives him ‘the discretion to restart the execution, and he should be allowed to exercise that discretion, and all other discretion under the State’s execution protocol.’

“The Court is correctly concerned about the consequences of allowing Commissioner Cain unbridled discretion. Under Mr. Cain, after all, the ‘consciousness check’ language of the MDOC Protocol has been changed three different times: Nov. 12, 2021, Dec. 12, 2022, and May 25, 2025.”

Craig said the 2022 protocol changed the consciousness check to four minutes after the third drug was administered, “despite the fact that the third drug, potassium chloride, ‘interferes with the electrical signals that stimulate the contractions of the heart, inducing cardiac arrest.’ The notion that the consciousness check would be performed after cardiac arrest demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about the reason for the check.”

As of Wednesday evening, June 18, Wingate had not filed his opinion on the matter.

Jordan has a petition for an emergency stay of execution awaiting a decision in the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices had scheduled the matter for conference Wednesday but have not shared the results of their discussion.

Also on Wednesday, the Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood and others against capital punishment held another call for the state to “Stand Down” on the execution of Jordan.

Earlier this week, a petition was sent to Gov. Tate Reeves requesting an in-person interview where Jordan’s representatives could plead for clemency on his behalf.

“Richard Gerald Jordan requests that you commute his death sentence to the lesser penalty of life in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections without parole,” Jordan’s representative Frank D. Rosenblatt wrote on Monday. Mr. Jordan’s representatives also request a fifteen-minute in-person or virtual interview with you. It is the long-standing practice of the Office of the Governor in Mississippi to allow a fifteen to twenty-minute meeting with a death-sentenced inmate’s representatives.”

Reeves had not responded as of Wednesday evening.

On Monday, Eric Marter, the eldest son of Edwina and Charles Marter said neither he nor his father nor his brother Kevin would attend the execution.

Lici Beveridge is a reporter for the Hattiesburg American and the Clarion Ledger. Contact her at lbeveridge@gannett.com. Follow her on X  @licibev or Facebook at facebook.com/licibeveridge.