Richard Jordan v. Christopher Epps, Commissioner

I agree with the majority that petitioner-appellant Richard Gerald Jordan’s ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims are without plausible merit and I concur in the majority’s denial of certificates of appeala-bility for those claims. I disagree with the majority, however, on Jordan’s prosecuto-rial-vindictiveness claim, which I believe deserves encouragement to proceed further.

Over more than a decade, one Mississippi prosecutor sought three times to impose the death penalty against Jordan, but each time a court, first the state trial court, then this federal circuit court, and then the…