Newly appointed United States Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to return convicted murderer John Fitzgerald Hanson to Oklahoma so he can be executed.
Hanson, 60, is serving a life sentence plus 107 years in a federal Louisiana prison for a series of armed robberies in northeast Oklahoma.
He is also on Oklahoma’s death row for the 1999 kidnapping and murder of Mary Bowles, which he was prosecuted for after his incarceration in Louisiana had already begun.
Hanson was scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma in 2022, but the U.S. Bureau of Prisons denied his transfer from federal prison to the state. The Bureau said a transfer was not in “the public interest.”
In a Jan. 23 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, Drummond renewed Oklahoma’s request for Hanson’s transfer after President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the restoration of the death penalty.
“The Department of Justice owes it to the victim and her family − as well as the public − to transfer inmate Hanson so that Oklahoma can carry out this just sentence,” Bondi wrote in a memo to the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday.
Bondi asked that Hanson be brought to the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center in Lexington, Oklahoma.
“Inmate Hanson viciously murdered an innocent woman. The victim experienced indescribable pain and terror before her violent death, and her family has suffered for decades as a result,” she wrote.
Drummond said he wants the transfer to be completed before the state’s first execution of 2025 so Hanson can be scheduled next, likely in June. Oklahoma is set to execute Wendell Grissom on March 20 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
Hanson is asking a federal judge in Louisiana to prevent his transfer.
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