Texas court overturns sentence for man on death row for nearly 50 years

The Texas court of criminal appeals has overturned the death sentence of Clarence Curtis Jordan, a 70-year-old man with intellectual disabilities, who spent nearly 50 years on death row – much of that time without a lawyer.

Jordan was convicted in 1978 for the murder of Joe L Williams, a 40-year-old grocer in Houston, and was sentenced to death. In the years that followed, courts determined that Jordan, who has intellectual disabilities, was “incompetent”, making him ineligible for execution under constitutional standards.

In 2024, attorney Ben Wolff, director of the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs in Austin, took up Jordan’s case. In 2025, he filed a petition to the court requesting Jordan’s death sentence be overturned, arguing that the case was “a troubling, yet remediable failure of Texas criminal justice”, according to the Houston Press.

“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,” the filing continued.