An Oklahoma death row inmate was executed Thursday after he was transferred from federal custody in Louisiana by the Trump administration in March.
John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, was pronounced dead at 10:11 a.m., ten minutes after receiving the lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
“Peace to everyone” was Hanson’s final statement as he lay strapped to a gurney.
Hanson and his accomplice Victor Miller were convicted of carjacking and kidnapping Mary Bowles from a Tulsa shopping mall in 1999.
The pair drove the woman to an Owasso area gravel pit where Miller fatally shot the owner, Jerald Thurman.
They then took Bowles to a nearby location where they shot her dead.
Miller was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Hanson’s lawyers claimed that he manipulated the autistic young man into committing the crime.
“I’m not an evil person,” Hanson said last month at his clemency hearing. “I was caught in a situation I couldn’t control. I can’t change the past, but I would if I could.”
