JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi's longest-serving death row inmate is set to be executed on June 25, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
Richard Gerald Jordan, 78, who was sentenced to death in 1976 for kidnapping and killing a woman, has filed multiple death sentence appeals, the most recent of which was denied in October.
The Mississippi ruling comes on the same day Army Combat veteran Jeffrey Hutchinson was scheduled to be executed in Florida. Before Thursday, 14 people had been executed in the U.S., including three in Florida.
The order did not specify the manner in which Jordan will be executed. Mississippi law allows death sentences to be carried out using lethal injection, nitrogen gas, electrocution or firing squad.
According to Mississippi Supreme Court records, Jordan kidnapped Edwina Marter in January 1976 and shot her to death in a forest in Harrison County. He then called her husband, Charles Marter, falsely claimed she was safe and asked for $25,000.
Records show that before the killing Jordan had traveled from Louisiana to Gulfport, Mississippi and called the Gulf National Bank, where Charles Marter worked as a loan officer. After he was told Marter could speak with him, he hung up, looked up the Marters' home address and went to the house posing as an electric company employee.
“After due consideration, the Court finds Jordan has exhausted all state and federal remedies for purposes of setting an execution,” the ruling read.
Mississippi's last execution was in December 2022.
FILE - This undated photo provided by the Mississippi Department of Corrections shows death row inmate Richard Gerald Jordan. (Mississippi Department of Corrections via AP, File)
BERLIN (AP) — European leaders are expected to cement support for Ukraine Monday as it faces Washington’s pressure to swiftly accept a U.S.-brokered peace deal.
After Sunday’s talks in Berlin between U.S. envoys and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian and European officials are set to continue a series of meetings in an effort to secure the continent’s peace and security in the face of an increasingly assertive Russia.
Zelenskyy sat down Sunday with U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in the German federal chancellery in the hopes of bringing the nearly four-year war to a close.
Washington has tried for months to navigate the demands of each side as Trump presses for a swift end to Russia’s war and grows increasingly exasperated by delays. The search for possible compromises has run into major obstacles, including control of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which is mostly occupied by Russian forces.
The U.S. government late Sunday said in a social media post on Witkoff’s account after the five-hour meeting that “a lot of progress was made.”
Earlier in the day, Zelenskyy voiced readiness to drop his country’s bid to join NATO if the U.S. and other Western nations give Kyiv security guarantees similar to those offered to NATO members. But Ukraine continued to reject the U.S. push for ceding territory to Russia.
Putin wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the part of the Donetsk region still under its control among the key conditions for peace.
The Russian president also has cast Ukraine’s bid to join NATO as a major threat to Moscow’s security and a reason for launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine renounce the bid for alliance membership as part of any prospective peace settlement.
Zelenskyy emphasized that any Western security assurances would need to be legally binding and supported by the U.S. Congress.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has spearheaded European efforts to support Ukraine alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said Saturday that “the decades of the ‘Pax Americana’ are largely over for us in Europe and for us in Germany as well.”
“Pax Americana” refers to the U.S.’s postwar dominance as a superpower that has brought relative peace to the globe.
Merz warned that Putin’s aim is “a fundamental change to the borders in Europe, the restoration of the old Soviet Union within its borders.”
“If Ukraine falls, he won’t stop,” Merz warned during a party conference in Munich.
Macron, meanwhile, vowed Sunday on social platform X that “France is, and will remain, at Ukraine’s side to build a robust and lasting peace — one that can guarantee Ukraine’s security and sovereignty, and that of Europe, over the long term.”
Putin has denied plans to attack any European allies.
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Ciobanu reported from Warsaw, Poland.
Steve Witkoff, special envoy of the United States, leaves through a hotel garage for talks between representatives of the U.S. and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz,stands in his office in the chancellory in Berlin, Germany, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Maryam Majd)
Steve Witkoff, special envoy of the United States, arrives for talks between representatives of the U.S. and Ukraine, at the Hotel Adlon, in Berlin, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (Kay Nietfeld/dpa via AP)
Jared Kushner, entrepreneur and former chief adviser to President Donald Trump, arrives for talks between representatives of the U.S. and Ukraine at the Hotel Adlon, in Berlin, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (Kay Nietfeld/dpa via AP)
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, right, watches Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arriving at the chancellory in Berlin, Germany, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Maryam Majd)
