Bondi orders federal inmate transferred to Oklahoma for execution

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — President Donald Trump's newly installed attorney general, Pam Bondi, has ordered the transfer of a federal inmate to Oklahoma so he can be executed, following through on Trump's sweeping executive order to more actively support the death penalty.

Bondi this week directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to transfer inmate George John Hanson, 60, so that he can be executed for his role in the kidnapping and killing of a 77-year-old woman in Tulsa in 1999.

“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 BOP's director.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who sought Hanson's transfer last month, praised Bondi's swift action. He requested Hanson be transferred before Oklahoma's next execution on March 20 so that he would be eligible for the next available execution date, likely in June.

Hanson was sentenced to death in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, after he was convicted of carjacking, kidnapping and killing Mary Bowles after he and an accomplice kidnapped the woman from a Tulsa shopping mall.

Hanson, whose name in Oklahoma court records is listed as John Fitzgerald Hanson, has been serving a life sentence in federal prison in Louisiana for several federal convictions, including being a career criminal, that predate his state death sentence.

Hanson's attorneys with the federal Public Defender's Office did not immediately comment on Bondi's order.

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.”