In McAlester, Oklahoma, a 61-year-old man named John Fitzgerald Hanson was executed by lethal injection after being transferred to state custody, a process expedited by a directive from the Trump administration. Hanson had been sentenced to death for his role in the carjacking, kidnapping, and subsequent murder of a woman in Tulsa back in 1999. The execution, carried out at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, began at 10:01 a.m. and he was declared deceased by 10:11 a.m. “Peace to everyone,” he remarked before undergoing the procedure.
Hanson’s transition to Oklahoma arose from President Donald Trump’s executive order promoting the death penalty. Prior to this, he was serving a life term for unrelated offenses in a federal prison in Louisiana. His attorneys had recently contended that his clemency hearing had been unfair due to a perceived bias from a board member with ties to the prosecution during Hanson’s trial. A temporary stay of execution issued by a district court judge was later revoked.
The prosecution alleged that Hanson, along with an accomplice named Victor Miller, abducted Mary Bowles from a shopping center in Tulsa. They were accused of taking Bowles to a remote area where Miller fatally shot Jerald Thurman, and thereafter, according to prosecutors, Hanson shot Bowles. Miller received a life sentence without parole for his participation in these crimes.
Jerald Thurman’s son, Jacob Thurman, who witnessed Hanson’s execution, expressed that it marked the end of “the longest nightmare of our lives,” highlighting the emotional toll on all involved families. Similarly, the protracted legal challenges related to Hanson’s death sentence angered Bowles’ niece, Sara Mooney, who criticized the lengthy and costly legal process, arguing that it diminished the intended justice of capital punishment.
During a clemency hearing last month, Hanson expressed remorse and apologized to the victims’ families, stating, “I’m not an evil person.” He described feeling powerless in the situation and wished he could change the past. His defense team acknowledged his involvement in the abduction and carjacking but argued there was no definitive proof that Hanson was the one who killed Bowles. They portrayed him as a manipulated individual who had been under the influence of Miller due to his troubled past and autism.
The efforts to transfer Hanson to Oklahoma from federal custody were pursued by both the current Attorney General Gentner Drummond and his predecessor John O’Connor, although an earlier attempt during President Joe Biden’s administration had been declined by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, citing that such a transfer did not align with the public interest.