A convicted murderer could face execution in Oklahoma this summer because of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
John Fitzgerald Hanson, 60, is now serving a life sentence for federal crimes at the U.S. Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana.
On Thursday, Attorney General Gentner Drummond asked the Federal Bureau of Prisons to return Hanson to Oklahoma before March 20 for execution. “Justice must not be delayed any further,” Drummond wrote in a letter.
The murderer, also known as George John Hanson, had been set for execution on Dec. 15, 2022, for a fatal shooting.
In his letter, Drummond complained “the Biden administration prevented the state from carrying out Inmate Hanson’s sentence by refusing to comply with federal law and perform a timely transfer of the inmate upon request.”
The AG told the bureau that one of Trump’s first acts of his second term was to counteract Joe Biden’s “inexplicable interference” with state criminal judgments.
On his first day back in office Monday, Trump issued an executive order supporting the death penalty.
“It is the policy of the United States to ensure that the laws that authorize capital punishment are respected and faithfully implemented, and to counteract the politicians and judges who subvert the law by obstructing and preventing the execution of capital sentences,” Trump stated in his order.
Drummond asked the bureau to comply with Trump’s “righteous” order by transferring Hanson.
What did Hanson do?
Hanson faces execution for murdering retired banker Mary Agnes Bowles after kidnapping her from a Tulsa mall on Aug. 31, 1999. The victim was 77.
He and an accomplice had wanted her car for a robbery spree. Hanson shot her in a ditch near Owasso after the accomplice gunned down a dirt pit owner, Jerald Thurman, according to testimony at his trial.
The dirt pit owner had spotted them on his property. Hanson later confessed to a friend, saying, “Everything went bad.”
Hanson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the dirt pit owner’s murder.
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He has spent most his time since the 1999 crime spree in federal prison for bank robbery and other federal crimes.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2022 had told Oklahoma’s attorney general at the time that transferring Hanson “for state execution is not in the public interest.”
The denial came after a moratorium had been imposed on federal executions.
In a 2021 memo about the moratorium, Merrick Garland, then U.S. attorney general, wrote, “Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations.”
In his executive order, Trump called for the death penalty to be pursued for all federal crimes “of a severity demanding its use.” Trump criticized Biden in the order for the moratorium and for commuting the sentences in December of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row.
Drummond wants Hanson back before March 20 “so that he is eligible for the next execution date.”
Executions in Oklahoma are now being scheduled about 90 days apart. Confessed killer Wendell Grissom faces execution March 20 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
If returned, Hanson still could avoid execution if the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommends clemency, and Gov. Kevin Stitt agrees.
Death penalty opponents claim he suffers from major mental illnesses, brain damage and autism.
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