Richard Jordan, who spent 48 years on Mississippi’s death row, received an execution by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Parchman.

A man who was on death row for nearly half a century has been executed in Mississippi. Richard Gerald Jordan died by lethal injection on Wednesday aged 79 after spending almost 50 years in prison.

The convicted murderer, a Vietnam War veteran, was sentenced to death in 1976 for kidnapping and murdering the wife of a bank loan officer.