Democratic congressional candidates, Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier gesture on stage with Mayor Zohran Mamdani during a Get Out The Vote rally ahead of New York's primary election, Thursday, June 18, 2026, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. [AP Photo/Ryan Murphy]
Clarence Curtis Jordan, or C.C., as his friends on the row called him, was on Texas death row for half a century — but for 40 of those years he did not have an attorney.
His life story is one you could not make up. And it is one that adds to the long list of stories that illuminate why the death penalty should be abolished immediately.
Jordan’s young life was filled with poverty and mental health challenges. After his mother died when he was 12 years old, he dropped out of school and his life began a downward spiral. He began committing petty crimes to support himself. The Texas juvenile justice system conducted an evaluation when Jordan was 15 and his IQ was measured at 56, well below 70, which is generally the cutoff for intellectual disability.
In 1978, Jordan was sentenced to death for killing a man in a grocery store. At a competency hearing, he testified about little creatures inside his body that tortured him. He said he heard the voice of his late mother, and he said he had a wife and three kids, which he did not. Jordan testified that he was not born but had come down from the sky through computer time and that he was fighting green creatures with pointed ears. Yet he was judged fit to stand trial!
In 1988, 38 years ago, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declared Jordan to be so mentally ill that the Eighth Amendment precluded his execution. And 38 years ago, Jordan was largely forgotten about by the Texas criminal legal system.
The Death Penalty Information Center wrote on April 20: “The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) found him incompetent to be executed in 1988. But Mr. Jordan then fell through the cracks of an inefficient prison system, and he languished on death row without an attorney for the next four decades.”
Defense attorney Benjamin Wolff, Director of the Texas Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, accidentally met Jordan in 2023 while visiting a mentally ill client, Syed Rabbani. Jordan was the neighbor of Rabbani at the medical unit. Wolff discovered Jordan had not had a lawyer since he had been found incompetent to stand trial in 1988. Wolff took Jordan’s case and filed a petition to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals asking that the death sentence be vacated.
Death sentence vacated
Finally, this year, on Jordan’s 70th birthday, April 9, his death sentence was vacated! A resentencing hearing was held in the trial court in Houston.
It was great news and the Harris County District Attorney declared he would not ask for a death sentence again. The only option was a life sentence with the possibility of parole. And because Jordan had done 50 years, he would immediately be up for parole.
Wolff went before the trial court and obtained a favorable ruling from Judge Katherine Thomas, who recommended Jordan be evaluated for a type of medical release — known as Medically Recommended Intensive Supervision — that releases some incarcerated people from prison, typically if they are either terminally ill, elderly or require long term care.
According to the Houston Chronicle on June 8: “It’s not guaranteed that Jordan will be granted medical release. More than 200 inmates — out of more than 1,700 inmates whose cases were presented — have been granted medical release since 2021, according to Texas Board of Pardons and Parole data.”
The good news ends here. The Parole Board, all of whom were appointed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, will decide Jordan’s future.
The bad news begins
After several strokes, Jordan was taken off death row in 2010 and moved to a medical prison, the Estelle Unit, just outside of Huntsville. His health has declined so dramatically that he is now totally incapacitated. He is quadriplegic. He has many eye diseases and is functionally blind and cannot speak. He is unable to feed himself or properly swallow food and requires an endoscopic gastric tube to obtain nutrition. He is basically confined to bed.
Jordan was not able to be in court for his resentencing.
In a press statement given to media at the resentencing, the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement stated: “We demand that Jordan be placed in an excellent assisted living center in Houston, the best that can be found. And, that the State of Texas pay the bill as long as Jordan is alive.”
It is abhorrent that any incarcerated person should be neglected legally, medically and physically for decades and decades. Jordan developed a multitude of health problems, many of which could have been prevented if health care in Texas prisons wasn’t so horribly lacking.
Prisons are a horrific crime and must be abolished.
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