OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma judge granted a temporary stay of execution Monday to a man whose transfer to death row was expedited by the Trump administration and who was scheduled to receive a lethal injection this week.
John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, was set to die Thursday for killing a Tulsa woman in 1999.
Hanson’s lawyers have argued that he did not receive a fair clemency hearing last month before the state’s five-member Pardon and Parole Board. They claim board member Sean Malloy was biased because he worked for the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office when Hanson was being prosecuted.
Malloy has said he never worked on Hanson’s case at the time and was unfamiliar with it before the clemency hearing. Malloy was one of three members who voted 3-2 to deny Hanson a clemency recommendation.
“A condemned prisoner, such as Mr. Hanson, possesses a clear and grave interest in the right to due process and the equitable administration of Oklahoma’s constitutional process for executive clemency,” Hanson’s attorney, Emma Rolls, wrote in their petition.
Attorney General Gentner Drummond argued that the district judge doesn’t have the authority to stay the execution and has asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate it.
Hanson was sentenced to death in Tulsa County after he was convicted of carjacking, kidnapping and killing Mary Bowles. Authorities said he and an accomplice kidnapped the woman from a Tulsa shopping mall.
Hanson was transferred to Oklahoma custody in March by federal officials following through on President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order to more actively support the death penalty.
Hanson had 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.
Both Drummond and his predecessor, John O’Connor, had sought Hanson’s transfer during President Joe Biden’s administration, but the U.S. Bureau of Prisons denied it, saying it was not in the public interest.