Susan Louise Jordan

Riverside County prosecutors said today that with a statewide injunction on executions lifted, a man who raped and killed a Riverside teen is expected to be put to death by lethal injection next week.

Albert Greenwood Brown was convicted in January 1982 of the rape and murder of 15-year-old Susan Louise Jordan. He is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 29 at San Quentin State Prison, barring intervention by a federal judge.

It would be the first execution in California in nearly five years.

A state appeals court in San Francisco on Monday 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.

The California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation has gone forward with preparations for the execution, which is on schedule, according to a spokeswoman for the state agency.

However, it could be delayed depending on what happens Friday, when a U.S. District Court judge is expected to rule on motions by Brown’s attorney for a delay or stay of the execution.

Brown has also asked Schwarzenegger for clemency based on claims that jurors in his trial weren’t provided with substantial mitigating information.

District Attorney Rod Pacheco opposes any further delays.

“It is time for Susan Jordan’s loved ones to finally get the justice they’ve waited 30 years to see,” he said. “This is a murderer who never claimed innocence and who has now exhausted all his appellate rights in an extremely horrific case. There is no reason for his execution to be further delayed.”
On Oct. 28, 1980, 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.

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.

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