AG Bondi orders transfer of federal lifer to Oklahoma to enable execution of state death sentence

As reported in this local article, "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." Here is more:

"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.

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....  

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.

This press release from the Oklahoma Attorney General notes the litigation over the transfer and provides this link to the Justice Department's filing.  Though I am not expert or even fully familiar with all prisoner transfer law, it strikes me as perverse (as well as quite dangerous) if a condemned state murderer would be able to evade a lawful state death sentence because he committed additional serious crimes which led him to also receive federal life sentences.