For the first time in 36 years, Harris County’s longest-serving death row inmate will have a lawyer. 

Clarence Curtis Jordan, 68, has been serving a death sentence since he was convicted of murdering Houston grocer Joe L. Williams in 1978. On Monday, Harris County District Court Judge Katherine N. Thomas signed a motion appointing Ben Wolff, director of the Texas Office of Forensic and Capital Writs, as Jordan’s lawyer. 

Wolff, whose office represents death row inmates in post-conviction legal proceedings, filed a motion to be appointed counsel for Jordan last Tuesday, arguing Jordan’s death sentence is “likely unconstitutional.”

“The interests of justice require the appointment of counsel,” Wolff wrote. 

Wolff said he became interested in Jordan’s case after representing Syed Rabbani, whose death sentence was overturned as unconstitutional last year. Rabbani, who is severely mentally ill, languished for decades on death row as his winning appeal gathered dust in the Harris County courts. 

“After Mr. Rabbani, I felt compelled to make sure that there weren’t other people in this situation, and Mr. Jordan’s (case) is almost exactly like Mr. Rabbani,” Wolff said in an interview with the Houston Landing. 

While Jordan does not have an appeal pending, he too is mentally ill and was declared incompetent to face execution in 1988. That, Wolff wrote in his motion, is the last time he had a lawyer. 

Jordan’s case also caught the attention of the Harris County prosecutor whose office handled Rabbani’s appeal. 

“Mr. Rabbani’s case was eye-opening to me,” said Josh Reiss, who leads the district attorney’s Post-Conviction Writs Division. “It slipped through the cracks. In light of that, I asked Ben to take a look at this.” 

Wolff had already initiated his investigation into Jordan when Reiss, who took over the Post-Conviction Writs Division in January 2017, made his request. 

Reiss cautioned that he does not yet know whether Jordan’s case similarly “slipped through the cracks” but said he had “an ethical obligation here to do justice.” 

Wolff said his ultimate goal is to improve Jordan’s quality of life, with a possible objective of moving him into hospice should his death sentence be overturned. 

“Even to the extent that Mr. Jordan dies in prison, the conditions of his confinement matter to him,” he said. 

An ‘eye-opening’ case 

Wolff said he met Jordan for the first time in late 2023 at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Estelle Unit, a maximum-security hospital wing, where Jordan is housed due to the incapacitating effects of a stroke.

“When I asked some questions, he made eye contact and stuck out his tongue like he was straining to talk, but he was unable to talk,” Wolff said. “After that day, I wanted to see whether I could do something for him.”

Wolff’s subsequent investigation into Jordan’s legal history found that Jordan’s appellate lawyer, Mary Moore, had ceased representing him after Texas’ highest criminal court declared him incompetent. That was in 1988. Since then, Wolff argued in his motion, death penalty jurisprudence has evolved and opened up new avenues for relief for Jordan — avenues he could not pursue on his own because of his mental illness, even as he remained on death row. 

Moore did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Incoherent, handwritten letters Jordan wrote to his trial court in Harris County appear to have prompted the court’s then-judge, Jan Krocker, to inquire about the case with Harris County prosecutors in 2000. Krocker subsequently declined to appoint Jordan a lawyer. 

“Case was looked at carefully in the 80’s,” Krocker wrote in a memo included in Wolff’s motion. “There appears to be no reason to appoint a lawyer at this time.” 

Krocker also inquired with prosecutors about the case’s status in 2004 and 2017, Wolff’s motion claims — yet neither the judge nor prosecutors ever decided Jordan needed a lawyer. 

Krocker did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Legal experts who reviewed Wolff’s motion called Jordan’s case “horrifying.”

“This is another stunning and disturbing case of an extremely vulnerable prisoner who was abandoned by the courts and left to die,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. “It’s not unreasonable to wonder how many others there are like Mr. Rabbani and Mr. Jordan who were lost and forsaken in the Texas prison system.”

Maher said that out of approximately 2,200 state death row inmates nationwide, there are only about a dozen who have lived longer under a death sentence than Jordan, and just one in Texas.

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