Oklahoma wants federal inmate transferred so he can be put to death

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma’s top prosecutor asked the federal Bureau of Prisons to transfer an inmate to state custody so that he could be executed for his role in the kidnapping and killing of a 77-year-old woman in 1999.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond requested the transfer Thursday of inmate George John Hanson, citing President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order this week that directs the U.S. Department of Justice to more actively support the death penalty.

Hanson, 60, whose name in Oklahoma court records is listed as John Fitzgerald Hanson, was sentenced to death in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, after he was convicted of carjacking, kidnapping and killing Mary Bowles, 77, after he and an accomplice kidnapped the woman from a Tulsa shopping mall. Hanson also is serving a life sentence for several federal convictions, including being a career criminal, that predate his state death sentence.

Drummond’s predecessor, John O’Connor, previously sought Hanson’s transfer and sued the Bureau of Prisons in 2022 after it refused to turn over the inmate to state custody during President Joe Biden’s administration. The agency’s regional director at the time, Heriberto Tellez, said the transfer was not in the public interest, a decision Drummond called “appalling.”

A federal judge ultimately dismissed Oklahoma’s case, ruling that the Bureau of Prisons director has broad discretion over whether to refuse a transfer request based on his determination of the public interest.

“The prior administration’s refusal to transfer Inmate Hanson to state custody to finally carry out a decades-old death sentence is the epitome of subverting and obstructing the execution of a capital sentence,” Drummond wrote Thursday in his letter to Danon Colbert, the Bureau of Prisons’ acting regional director.

Randilee Giamusso, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, declined to comment on Drummond’s request.

“Based on privacy, safety, and security reasons, we do not comment on any inmate’s conditions of confinement, including transfers or reasons for transfers,” Giamusso wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

Oklahoma has put to death 15 inmates since resuming executions in October 2021 following a de facto moratorium that resulted from problematic lethal injections in 2014 and 2015. Its next execution is scheduled for March 20.