- U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered the return of convicted murderer John Fitzgerald Hanson to Oklahoma for execution.
- Hanson was convicted in Oklahoma for the 1999 murders of Mary Agnes Bowles and Jerald Thurman.
- Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond requested the transfer following President Trump’s executive order on capital punishment.
- Hanson’s execution was delayed in 2022 under the Biden administration’s opposition to the death penalty.
New U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to return convicted murderer John Fitzgerald Hanson to Oklahoma for execution.
“Inmate Hanson viciously murdered an innocent woman,” Bondi told the acting director of Federal Bureau of Prisons in a memo Tuesday.
“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,” she wrote.
Hanson, 60, is serving a life sentence for bank robbery and other federal crimes at the U.S. Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana. He avoided execution in 2022 when the Federal Bureau of Prisons under the Biden administration refused to transfer him.
Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, renewed the state’s request for a transfer on Jan. 23.
He made the request after President Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that it is U.S. policy “to ensure that the laws that authorize capital punishment are respected and faithfully implemented.”
Drummond wants the transfer to be completed before the state’s first execution of 2025 so Hanson can be scheduled next. Oklahoma is set to execute confessed killer Wendell Grissom on March 20 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
Hanson is asking a federal judge in Louisiana to prevent his transfer.
“It is well established that the federal government enjoys primary jurisdiction overan individual it ‘first arrested and imprisoned,'” his attorneys argued in a Jan. 29 complaint.
What did Hanson do?
Hanson faces execution for murdering retired banker Mary Agnes Bowles after kidnapping her from the parking lot of a Tulsa mall on Aug. 31, 1999. The victim was 77.
He and an accomplice 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.”
“She was left like garbage in a field for the predators to scavenge,” Bowles’ niece wrote the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board in 2022.
“Mary was our family matriarch,” the niece, Sara Parker Mooney, wrote. “She was the glue that held our family together. With her murder we lost our sense of family.”
Hanson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the dirt pit owner’s murder.
Why was the transfer denied in 2022?
Hanson had been set for execution in Oklahoma on Dec. 15, 2022. A regional director at the Federal Bureau of Prisons refused to release him, writing “his transfer to state authorities for state execution is not in the public interest.”
The position was in keeping with the Biden administration’s opposition to the death penalty.
Joe Biden had promised during his 2020 campaign “to work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.”
After Biden took office, his attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on federal executions. Bondi lifted the moratorium Feb. 5.
“This shameful era ends today,” she wrote in a memo to employees.
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