OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A federal decide in Texas on Tuesday rejected Oklahoma’s attempt to have a federal prisoner transferred to state custody so he may be executed.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor denied Oklahoma’s request to have inmate John Fitzgerald Hanson, 58, transferred from federal custody to Oklahoma and dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction.
Oklahoma sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons in October for refusing to flip over Hanson to state authorities, with federal officers saying on the time the switch was “not in the general public’s finest curiosity.”
Oklahoma argued that federal jail officers acted past the scope of their authority, however the decide rejected that argument and wrote in his ruling that the Bureau of Prisons director has broad discretion over whether or not to refuse a switch request based mostly on his dedication of the general public curiosity.
Hanson was initially scheduled to obtain a deadly injection on Thursday on the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
He was sentenced to demise in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, after he was convicted of carjacking, kidnapping and killing Mary Bowles, 77, after he and an confederate kidnapped the lady from a Tulsa shopping center. Hanson is also serving a life sentence for a number of federal convictions, together with being a profession prison, that predate his state demise sentence.
“We disagree with the court’s decision,” Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor, who shouldn’t be associated to the decide, stated in a press release. “It is in the public interest for John Hanson to face justice for the murder of Mary Bowles. We are evaluating our options going forward.”
The U.S. Justice Department below Democratic President Joe Biden — who has vowed to work to finish the demise penalty — introduced final 12 months that it was halting federal executions. That step got here after a historic use of capital punishment below Donald Trump’s presidency, with 13 executions carried out in six months. The Bureau of Prisons’ refusal to flip over Hanson has raised questions on whether or not the company is utilizing its energy to ship on the president’s political pledge.
Messages left Tuesday with attorneys for the Bureau of Prisons weren’t instantly returned.
Oklahoma has put to demise seven inmates since resuming executions in October 2021 and has scheduled 18 extra executions in 2023 and 2024. The state had one of many nation’s busiest demise chambers till issues in 2014 and 2015 led to a de facto moratorium. That included jail officers realizing they acquired the unsuitable deadly drug simply hours away from executing Richard Glossip in September 2015. It was later realized the identical unsuitable drug had been used to execute an inmate in January 2015.
The drug mix-ups adopted a botched execution in April 2014 in which inmate Clayton Lockett struggled on a gurney earlier than dying 43 minutes into his deadly injection — and after the state’s prisons chief ordered executioners to cease.
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