Oklahoma City (AP) – The newly installed attorney general of President Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, has ordered the transfer of a federal prisoner to Oklahoma so that he can be executed, following Trump's radical executive order to support the death penalty.
This week Bondi dedicated the Federal Bureau of Prisons to transfer prisoner George John Hanson, 60, so that he can be executed for his role in the kidnapping and killing a 77-year-old woman in Tulsa in 1999.
“The Ministry of Justice is owing the victim and her family – as well as the public – to transfer prisoner Hanson, so that Oklahoma can carry out this righteous sentence,” Bondi wrote to the director of the BOP in a memo.
Familiar news and daily pleasure, exactly in your inbox
Watch yourself-the Yodel is the source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who sought the transfer of Hanson last month, praised the quick action of Bondi. He asked Hanson to transfer before the next performance of Oklahoma on March 20, so that he would be eligible for the next available implementation date, probably in June.
Hanson was sentenced to death in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, after he was convicted of carjacking, kidnapping and murdered by Mary Bowles after he and an accomplice kidnapped the woman from a Tulsa shopping center.
Hanson, whose name in Oklahoma's court reports is mentioned as John Fitzgerald Hanson, has broadcast a lifelong prison sentence in the federal prison in Louisiana for various federal convictions, including a career criminal, who date from before the death penalty of the state.
The lawyers of Hanson at the office of the federal public defender did not immediately comment on Bondi's order.
The predecessor of Drummond, John O'Connor, previously sought the transfer of Hanson and sued the office of prisons in 2022 after it refused to transfer the prisoner to state detention during the government of President Joe Biden. The regional director of the office at the time, Heriberto Tellez, said that the transfer was not in the public interest, a decision that Drummond called “terrible.”
