Clarence Jordan’s mental and physical health have deteriorated while he’s been locked in a prison cell for almost 50 years, suffering from intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia, serving time on one of the longest death sentences in the nation that lawyers claim in a new legal filing was unconstitutional.
Jordan, 69, was convicted of capital murder in the October 14, 1977, shooting death of 40-year-old Joe L. Williams, a clerk at Rice Food Market in Houston, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records. Prior to his incarceration, Jordan completed seven years of education, and Texas courts have declared him mentally incompetent.
Ben Wolff, director of the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs in Austin, took Jordan’s case late last year.
Earlier this week Wolff filed a 52-page writ of habeas corpus — a court order demanding that a person in custody be brought before a judge to determine if their detention is legal — requesting Jordan’s death sentence be overturned. The filing points out that the Harris County jury that sentenced the inmate “did not have an adequate vehicle through which it might assess the mitigating evidence of cognitive and psychiatric dysfunction presented during his trial.”
“This case presents a troubling, yet remediable failure of Texas criminal justice,” the filing states. “Mr. Jordan is an incompetent, brain-damaged person with an IQ that has been assessed at scores of 56 and 60. Mr. Jordan has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, mental retardation, and organic brain dysfunction — and was known during his trial as Father Nature. He has largely been unable to advocate or care for himself.
“To date, Mr. Jordan has been on death row for nearly 50 years,” the writ continues. “Yet, he has not had a lawyer for over 30 years, and has spent that time utterly forgotten and wasting away in a Texas prison. In the interim, Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has made clear that Mr. Jordan’s death sentence is unconstitutional.”
The case was originally tried in the 184th District Court of Harris County, but the writ was filed directly with the Criminal Court of Appeals, Wolff said. The court can take as long as it wants to recommend granting or denying what’s requested in the filing.
“It could be one month or it could be 10 months,” Wolff said. “I would expect that they would evaluate the strong legal claims that we raised.”
Those familiar with the process say the most likely outcome is that Jordan’s death sentence will be overturned and he’ll be re-sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Under that sentence, because he’s already served 47 years, he’ll be eligible for parole immediately. Wolff declined to comment on whether Jordan has family members who could care for him.
“We view this as a moral imperative, at the very least, even if he remains incarcerated for the rest of his natural life, that his quality of life, his treatment will be potentially more humane,” the attorney said.
Wolff has visited Jordan in prison and said the death row inmate is bedridden and has “serious medical issues.” Jordan is no longer housed with other death row inmates at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston but at a maximum-security prison with a hospital wing in Huntsville.
As far back as 1982, while in the Harris County Jail psychiatric ward awaiting retrial after his death sentence was overturned due to a “jury issue,” Jordan reported hearing voices and hallucinations of “old, weird, burnt-up looking people slashing at his ear,” according to court documents. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death a second time in 1983.
“Jordan has a history of bizarre behavior, claiming at one point that Jesus Christ had endowed him with unique and superior abilities,” according to prison records.
Over almost five decades of Jordan’s incarceration, Texas taxpayers have spent more than $1 million just to house him, not to mention the medical bills.
Just one Texas Death Row inmate, Earvin Harvey of Angelina County, and a few others in the 27 death penalty jurisdictions in the United States have been waiting on an execution date longer than Jordan.
Jordan’s case came to Wolff’s attention, the attorney said, while he was representing another death row inmate, Syed Rabbani.
Rabbani, 59, challenged the constitutionality of his 1988 death sentence for the fatal shooting of a Bangladeshi immigrant at a Houston convenience store. After allowing the inmate to spend 30 years on death row, officials with the Harris County DA’s office announced at a 2023 resentencing hearing that they were no longer pursuing death, citing “some very serious mental and physical health issues affecting Mr. Rabbani some three decades after the capital murder.”
Rabbani was resentenced to life and is now eligible for parole based on time served, but was denied in March based on the “nature of his offense.” He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and is housed at a medical unit in Dickinson.
Scott Pope, division chief of the Harris County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, was on a Zoom call with Wolff and others from the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs last week when Jordan’s case and plans for the legal filing were discussed.
“The likelihood that some relief would be granted is fairly high,” Pope said. “Because these things didn’t happen like they should have, I think the likelihood is very high that we could concede on that issue. I sense that’s the way it’s going to go.”
Whether that relief would actually provide Jordan a better quality of life in his final years remains to be seen. If his sentence is commuted to life, he still has to go through a parole process. If he’s transferred to another unit with better medical care, he’s still in prison. And if he’s released, he’ll have to find a way to pay for housing and medical care because the state won’t do it for him.
According to court documents, Jordan was born into a “fractured family,” and as one of eight siblings, his childhood was riddled with poverty and instability. He saw very little of his father growing up and his mother died when he was 12 years old.
Jordan’s court filing is a “Penry claim” that mitigating evidence of a defendant’s mental retardation or a troubled childhood should be weighed by the jury in determining whether to impose the death penalty. That didn’t happen back in the late 1970s when Jordan’s case was tried, attorneys say.
Jordan was also tried during a time when the only sentencing options for capital murder in Texas were death and life with the possibility of parole after 40 years. Death sentences have declined since life without the possibility of parole became an option in 2005, but Harris County still leads the nation in convicted murderers sent to death row.
Intellectual disability is a common reason for people to be removed from death row, says Kristin Houle Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
On April 16, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted relief to death row inmate Larry Estrada based on his claim of intellectual disability and ordered his sentence be changed to life in prison. Estrada was convicted in a 1988 Harris County convenience store robbery and murder. He was 18 at the time of the crime and 19 when sentenced to death.
Nineteen people have been removed from death row in Texas since 2017 due to evidence of intellectual disability. More than one-third of those cases were tried in Harris County, Cuellar said.
Pope said there could be other Harris County cases where a Penry claim is a viable option.
“I do know that we will continue to work with defense attorneys and whoever else wants to bring a claim,” he said.
Wolff said the best-case scenario is that Jordan will be removed from death row.
“Secondarily, once his unconstitutional death sentence is removed, he has an opportunity to receive less restrictive and more appropriate care,” he said.
“For nearly five decades, Texas has confined Mr. Jordan under an unconstitutional death sentence,” the attorney said in his legal filing. “For nearly four decades, Mr. Jordan — an intellectually disabled, schizophrenic person, who this Court and the State long ago agreed was incompetent — has been without counsel who might advocate for him. Mr. Jordan has been intellectually limited since childhood, and by his young adulthood lost first his mind, then his freedom, and then counsel or access to legal process, all the while he possessed meritorious claims for relief.”
