Anissa Jordan Took Part in a Robbery. She Went to Prison for Murder.

Anissa Jordan was born in Oakland, California, in 1968, the last of eight children. For years, her mother’s live-in boyfriend beat and molested her and her half sister Althenia. The girls didn’t tell their mother. “It was our secret,” Jordan told me. When Jordan was in fourth grade, Althenia was murdered. The case was never solved.

Jordan was held back in school, started acting out, and was sent to juvenile hall. By 10th grade, she was spending most of her time “partying and having fun and smoking weed and drinking beer.” More stints in juvenile hall followed, then a string of arrests and convictions as an adult, nearly all of them theft-related. She had her first child, Amanda, at 21, followed by two more daughters and a son.

In 2005, Jordan was 36. She was on felony probation, unemployed, and addicted to drugs and alcohol. She had moved in with her mother, who was caring for Jordan’s children. “I was truly broken,” she said. Then Jordan met Greshinal Green, a sweet-talking man with a violent criminal past. He told Jordan that he loved her and promised her “all these fantastic things.” But first, she had to help him.

One night that May, Jordan crossed the Bay Bridge into San Francisco in a white Toyota Camry with Green and a woman named Lenora Robinson. Jordan, carrying a red purse and her hair in gold braids, played the role of decoy. She and Robinson approached two men in the Tenderloin, a high-crime area of the city, and asked if they had any ecstasy tablets. Green then emerged from the shadows with a Smith & Wesson .38 Special.

Jordan stood nearby as Green ordered the victims to lie down. “Make sure you got everything,” he told Robinson. Jordan went back to the car and hid a necklace belonging to one of the victims in her purse. She remained there as Green and Robinson left to seek out another mark. She was still in the car when Green and Robinson tried to rob a third man, Carlos Garvin. When Garvin resisted, Green shot and killed him.

Two uniformed police officers happened to be in a patrol car nearby. Over the radio, a dispatcher reported the shooting and a description of the suspects. The officers pulled over the Camry with Green, Robinson, and Jordan inside. Jewelry belonging to one of the first victims was found in Jordan’s purse.

The state charged the suspects with first-degree murder. Although Jordan was not at the scene when Garvin was killed, and hadn’t participated in the attempt to rob him, prosecutors argued that she was responsible for any acts committed as part of the day’s larger plot. In for a penny, in for a pound.

In June 2006, a jury returned a verdict. It found Green, Robinson, and Jordan guilty. (A fourth defendant, who had driven the Toyota on the night of the murder,. “We in San Francisco will not tolerate people coming into this town to commit crimes,” Harris . “We will punish them to the fullest.”