Federal Judge Approves Execution Of Riverside County Murderer
A federal judge ruled today that the execution of a man who raped and murdered a Riverside teen nearly 30 years ago can go forward next week.
Albert Greenwood Brown is set to be put to death Wednesday at San Quentin State Prison for the Oct. 28, 1980, sex killing of 15-year-old Susan Louise Jordan.
It would be the first execution in California in nearly five years.
U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel found that the state had addressed the court’s concerns that the previous lethal injection procedure was unconstitutional.
The San Jose-based judge said Brown must decide by 6 p.m. tomorrow whether he wants to be put to death by a single drug or via a three-drug formula recently put into effect.
On Monday, a state appeals court panel in San Francisco overturned a moratorium on executions put in place in 2006, when a Marin County Superior Court judge ruled that the standard protocol for lethal injections allowed for excruciating pain before death.
Brown grabbed Jordan as she was walking to school on Victoria Avenue in Riverside. The defendant dragged the teen into an orange grove, where he stripped her of her clothing, sexually assaulted her and strangled her with one of her own shoelaces, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
Brown called the girl’s mother at home later that day and taunted her, saying, “You will never see your daughter again,” according to Chief Assistant District Attorney Bill Mitchell.
He was convicted in January 1982 of murder and forcible rape, with a great bodily injury allegation.
Brown had been previously convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl almost exactly three years earlier. He pleaded guilty to that assault and was sentenced to four years in state prison, but was paroled after barely serving half his term. He murdered Susan four months later.
