Cruelty Is Now the Point for BOP
Just before leaving office in January 2025, outgoing Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) removed 37 federal prisoners from death row, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.16.] But incoming Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) immediately directed his new Attorney General (AG), Pam Bondi, to look for ways to bring state capital charges against them so that they can be killed anyway.
None of those 37 prisoners have faced such charges yet. But Bondi sent another federal prisoner to face an execution in Oklahoma on March 3, 2025, granting a request from Oklahoma AG Gentner Drummond (R) to extradite John Fitzgerald Hanson from a federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) lockup in Louisiana to carry out a state capital murder conviction.
Hanson, 60, was serving a life sentence for a bank robbery at the United States Penitentiary in Pollock when Drummond requested his extradition to Oklahoma to carry out his execution for the 1999 murder of Mary Agnes Bowles, 77. It was her car that Hanson then used to hold up a Tulsa credit union. Biden had blocked former AG Merrick Garland from granting the request since Drummond made it in 2023, shortly after his election.
Trump also told Bondi to review the confinement conditions of those 37 prisoners that Biden took off death row and “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”
“The one thing that was clear from the order was that it sounded like the administration was going to try to influence placement of people, and try to do so under conditions that they called ‘monstrous’ in their order,” said Yale Law School Prof. Miriam Gohara, a former federal public defender. “That suggests that they’re actually encouraging the [BOP] to maintain monstrous conditions, or that they think they’re already monstrous conditions in the BOP somewhere, and that somebody could be put there.” Which, added Gohara, “seems like a very odd thing for the executive to be saying about one of his agencies.”
“I was really taken aback by the number of adjectives in the order,” agreed fellow former federal public defender Dale Baich. “So I just think it’s going to be a real heavy lift going forward to challenge those conditions.”
Sources: The Intercept, KOTV, USA Today
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