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June 13, 2025
Oklahoma completes execution for murder committed 25+ years ago
As reported in this local article, "convicted murderer has been executed in Oklahoma as a direct result of President Donald Trump's return to office. John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, was pronounced dead at 10:11 a.m. Thursday, June 12, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary." Here is more:
He had been scheduled for execution on Dec. 15, 2022, but the Biden administration refused to return him to Oklahoma from a federal prison in Louisiana. The transfer went through on March 1, weeks after Trump began his second term.
He was executed for the fatal shooting of Mary Agnes Bowles, who was kidnapped from the parking lot of a Tulsa mall on Aug. 31, 1999. The victim was 77. Hanson and an accomplice, Victor Miller, wanted the retired banker's car for a robbery spree. Hanson has always denied being the shooter, his attorneys said.
Hanson had been serving a life sentence, plus 82 years, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana, for federal crimes involving the robbery spree. Oklahoma's attorney general, Gentner Drummond, sought Hanson's transfer after Trump issued a sweeping executive order on his first day back in office "restoring" the death penalty.... “This case demonstrates that no matter how long it takes, Oklahoma will hold murderers accountable for their crimes," Drummond said in a news release after witnessing the execution....
The execution took only 10 minutes to complete after Hanson made his brief final statement. It was the 17th in Oklahoma since lethal injections resumed in October 2021 after a long hiatus and one of the fastest.
June 13, 2025 at 08:38 AM | Permalink
Comments
I've been critical of Trump quite a few times, but he deserves credit for allowing justice -- after full and exhaustive due process -- to proceed.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 13, 2025 9:57:03 AM
Stumping for a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission again, Bill?
https://immigrationimpact.com/2025/04/03/men-deported-el-salvador-stories-investigation/
Posted by: Frank Fosdick | Jun 13, 2025 6:43:42 PM
Frank Fosdick --
You have unfinished business. Five days ago, you wrote:
"Being a member in good standing of the Federalist Society, Bill practices and expects disregard of law-breaking by Republican activists and politicians."
I responded: "What a breathtaking liar you are. Below is what I said word-for word while the Jan. 6 riot was still underway:
Acting AG Rosen Must Bring the Full Weight of the Law Against Today’s Violence at the Capitol
by Bill Otis · Published Jan 6, 2021 1:14 pm · Updated Jan 6, 2021 1:26 pm
Numerous reports say that pro-Trump protesters have invaded the Capitol to make it impossible for Vice President Pence (who has been evacuated) to count the electoral votes. One woman has been shot, although the specific circumstances are unclear at this hour.
This is intolerable. If the rule of law means anything, it means that we forswear violence and intimidation in favor of peaceful persuasion and legal process. I understand that many on Trump’s side feel urgently, and not entirely without basis, that the election was infected with fraud. But adherence to law is so hard precisely because its value is so great: It demands that we restrain even our most urgent feelings in favor of peaceful (though often maddening) process. The alternative to the rule of law is the rule of the jungle.
The upshot is that Acting AG Rosen must see to it that the full weight of the law be brought against the Capitol invaders. If intimidation and force are not acceptable for BLM and Antifa — and they aren’t — they are not acceptable for anyone else, either. Let the prosecutions begin." ###
As I said, FF, you're a breathtaking liar. Your claim that "Bill practices and expects disregard of law-breaking by Republican activists and politicians" was knowingly and flagrantly false. It's past time to admit you were lying and apologize.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 14, 2025 1:06:14 PM
Bill,
You have some unfinished business of your own.
"You, Bill, at least here, are just a liar. And based on your answer in the other thread not only does it seem you don’t have an earthly clue what scruples actually are, but your inability to take a step away from your own obvious and easily verifiable lie is a pretty good indicator of what you do and don’t have."
Thus concludes a lengthy comment by Jon S (public defender). Here's the link. https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2025/05/conflicting-theories-on-the-proper-role-of-just-deserts-irrelevant-complementary-or-inviolate.html#comments
Moreover I don't see how your quote falsifies what I said. One instance of you decrying law-breaking by Republican activists and politicians doesn't mean you don't disregard it in general. For example, when you defended Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones for allegedly making generalizations about non-whites having a predisposition or propensity for violence, you obviously didn't interpret her as meaning that every non-white person is a violent criminal. Straw-man attacks are a common pattern with you; you practice them regularly in disputes on this blog. If this sort of transparent fallacy was a characteristic of your appellate briefs, it's not a surprise you weren't nominated (successfully? or at all?) to the federal bench, even if your ideology and loyalty were as unimpeachable to Team Republican as, say, Brett Kavanaugh's.
Even the exception upon which you staking your reputation as a non-partisan condemnor of crime cannot sustain that burden (1) if you have since decided to reinterpret the Capitol invasion as having actually been an "antifa operation" (whether openly or under a false flag, as variously claimed by conservatives--see https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-928706165913 ) or (2) if you have since decided that Trump's blanket pardon of the January 6th defendants was justified.
And that's the salient question in these sentencing, pardoning, and commutation threads of 2025. I understand that you want to draw attention to one instance of you adopting an non-abhorrent stance on an issue, four and a half years ago.
The question is, are you willing to adopt a non-abhorrent stance on the events of TODAY?
And you can read that "TODAY" literally, given the surprising and violent deaths of Melissa and Mark Hortman.
Have a little courage. You can always choose silence again in a few years if a governor or president pardons the murderer.
Posted by: Frank Fosdick | Jun 14, 2025 11:32:09 PM
FF --
What do you achieve by your superior tone? That's an actual question.
In the world as I would have it, the killer of the Hortmans would face a jury with the power to impose the death penalty. Do you agree?
"Have a little courage."
Consider getting off your high horse. But if that's not to happen, here's the more neutral gauge of courage: Take the guy who's open rather than the guy who hides. Take the guy who uses his real name not a fake name. Take the guy who puts forth rather than hides his background. Take the guy who cites his cases so that readers can exam for themselves what judges thought. Take the guy who invites debate rather than finds reasons to avoid it.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 16, 2025 11:51:43 AM
Bill,
"What do you achieve by your superior tone?"
So you're tone-policing now? You have nothing more on your distorted characterization of my claim?
"That's an actual question."
Of limited or no relevance. Don't insult your audience by assuming they can't perceive your failure to engage the content of an argument--here, on THIS forum, not behind a lectern someplace. (If someone accepts your challenge and it goes badly for you, perhaps at the subsequent one you can light up the bat signal--the maimed one with one right wing--and fill the audience with College Republicans or the local thumb-suckers' chapter of the Federalist Society.)
"In the world as I would have it, the killer of the Hortmans would face a jury with the power to impose the death penalty. Do you agree?"
Not sure that I do. While I have, for as long as I can remember, felt that humans can commit acts so terrible that they deserve death, I have grave concerns that the apparatus of the State can be entrusted with administering it. The potential for abuse is significant, and history replete with examples of its misapplication for the basest and most corrupt ends. This is of course true for all other penal remedies, the difference being mainly one of degree. Since we can't restore life or time to people, the best we can do is acknowledge fault, award them damages, and earnestly reform the flaws that led to the error. I acknowledge that in this multiple-choice quiz, the conservative prefers to write in "none of the above". That, in the U.S., federal and state governments take the conservative choice of redress and thus do a crap job of remediating lesser miscarriages is, in my view, ominous evidence that the state is disinclined to objectively investigate, concede, or attempt recompense for its own errors. I'm sure every DP advocate licensed by a bar association in the U.S. is aware of the cases of Evans, Bentley, and Mattan in the U.K., and hypothesize that they have agreed to adopt the position that the U.S. has never wrongfully executed anyone (or at least not since 1973). Any fact that must be denied to maintain that position, is and will be denied. This is the finality that your system requires.
But on the other hand, vigilantism is no substitute. This country's sorry history of lynchings, frequently with the tacit support of law enforcement and local newspapers, is proof thereof.
What good does this information do you? You found my opinions categorically without merit already, on all subjects. How does knowing that I'm an idiot DP opponent, on recognizably de Tocquevillian principles, reduce my credibility further to Team Conservative?
And you're still avoiding the material and timely question of whether you'd oppose an executive branch pardon or clemency for the murderer.
"Take the guy who's open rather than the guy who hides. Take the guy who uses his real name not a fake name."
You implicitly characterize yourself as open and me as opaque; I submit that we conceal different things. My name is not material to any argument I advance. I offer myself as an authority on no subject; where I demonstrate (or pretend to) "erudition", as federalist put it, it is only by citing readily available and widely accepted, if sometimes specialized, facts. (At other times, mainstream press reports suffice.)
"Take the guy who puts forth rather than hides his background."
Where one's background is relevant, this is sound advice. Where it isn't, it's distraction and a fallacy known as "appeal to authority". I get that authority has appeal to you, in professional exercise of state power, in justification of state action to advance partisan conservative interests, and in genuflection thereto for your professional advancement.
"Take the guy who cites his cases so that readers can exam for themselves what judges thought."
Good advice!--but misapplied in an overly specific context, and unhelpfully vague to boot. Where you cited your cases above, you provided a simple list thereof. Explain to the folks at home why briefs contain not only a table of authorities, but quotations from relevant cases.
"Take the guy who invites debate rather than finds reasons to avoid it."
This criterion does not distinguish us. Whereas I decline to debate you (Lincoln-Douglas style, as the National Forensic League terms it) in a personal, live setting, I invite you to practice ARGUMENT, in the formal, empirically and/or logically decidable sense, here, in writing, in this forum. Your preferences are opposite to mine.
I readily concede the possibility that you have superior skills at personal insult, straw-man distortions, showboating, presentation of irrelevant facts, and generally snowing your opponent and the audience with nonsense. It would surprise no one that an experienced appellate litigator would overmatch a faceless Joe Blow from the Internet in such a contest.
What IS surprising is that the same practiced litigator seems so wary of engaging that same nonentity in a less formal setting that nevertheless demands competence in written communication and which affords ample time for close reading and consideration of the case offered.
I offer myself as no authority of any sort. Why, then, are you so shy of engaging a person's arguments? Why, in nearly every disagreement in which you participate on this blog, not just with me but with others, do you either fade away when facing sustained challenge, or demand to face your opponent over a lectern in live performance before you will offer up what you are so sure is a convincing case?
If an argument stops making sense when written down and given time to think about carefully, it didn't make sense in the first place.
Posted by: Frank Fosdick | Jun 16, 2025 6:13:29 PM
Frank Fosdick --
The main thing you do in your "answers" is spit. You consistently use an arrogant, rude and superior tone. And you're dishonest, sometimes directly but more often by some diversion, of which you have an ample variety and supply.
OK, fine. That's your choice to make (and, I guess, a good reason to hide your real name). Still, that being said, I have lots of ways I can use my time, and a lot of stuff to read and respond to, and trying to have a normal, productive conversation with you has proven to be futile. So from now on, when I see one of your posts, I'll just scroll.
Too bad in a sense. You're smart enough to have a normal exchange, but just too sold on yourself and too sold on The Other Side Is Bad And Worth Only My Contempt.
I have many very bright but better mannered adversaries, and I'll spend my time listening to them.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jun 18, 2025 5:51:36 PM
