USA: Two executions on two consecutive days in Oklahoma and South Carolina
On Thursday and Friday, one man was executed by lethal injection in each of the US states of Oklahoma and South Carolina. This brings the number of executions in the USA to 23 in 2025.
John Hanson
On Thursday morning, 61-year-old John Hanson was executed by lethal injection in the US state of Oklahoma. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a 77-year-old woman whom he and an accomplice had attacked in her car in 1999, abducted and finally shot dead.
The execution of the death sentence was preceded by a legal tug-of-war. A judge had issued a stay of execution three days earlier, which was lifted two days later.
Hanson was due to be executed in December 2022. To do so, he would have had to be transferred from a federal prison in Louisiana, where he was being held at the time, to Oklahoma. President Joe Biden’s administration prevented this at the time. Under the current administration of Donald Trump, however, the execution was immediately made possible by transferring John Hanson to Oklahoma.
According to court documents, his accomplice, who got away with life imprisonment, later boasted that he had shot the old lady himself. All of this leads to a “disturbing miscarriage of justice”, according to Hanson’s lawyers. Their client suffered from autism and had been manipulated by the dominant accomplice.
In his final words, Hanson spoke of forgiveness and peace: “Just forgive me” or “Just forgiveness” and “Peace to everyone”.
While a niece of the victim, who was among the witnesses, criticized the system that took 26 years to carry out Hanson’s death sentence, a grandniece of the victim publicly stated in an online vigil:
“I have spent my entire life grieving the loss of my great aunt, but I never, never, ever wanted anyone to be killed over this. John Hanson’s death makes my pain worse. I am grateful for all who are fighting against this immoral and horrible form of punishment. I am convinced that the death penalty only perpetuates and reproduces violence. The death penalty does nothing to heal the pain suffered by the victims’ families. My father sees it the same way – I know there are different views on this, but many see it as we do, that this was a terrible action and we wish John Hanson was still alive.”
Stephen Stanko
On Friday evening, 57-year-old Stephen Stanko was executed by lethal injection in the US state of South Carolina. He had been sentenced to death twice, firstly for killing a 74-year-old friend of his, whose bank account he then emptied, and secondly for murdering his 43-year-old girlfriend. He then raped her teenage daughter and slit her throat, but she survived and testified against him at the trial. The crimes took place just a few hours apart on one day in April 2005.
In his last words, Stanko asked for forgiveness and not to be judged solely on the worst day of his life. Stanko spoke for around three and a half minutes before he was administered his first dose of pentobarbital.
He appeared to say something else, turned to the victims’ families and then breathed rapidly several times while his lips trembled, according to eyewitnesses. After about a minute, he appeared to stop breathing. About 13 minutes later, a prison employee asked for a second dose of pentobarbital. About 28 minutes after the execution began, he was pronounced dead.
Stanko had actually opted for execution by firing squad. However, after the autopsy of the last criminal shot in South Carolina revealed that none of the three bullets had hit the heart, Stanko gave preference to lethal injection, although this is also controversial.
A petition on his behalf, created by the organization South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, reports that Stanko had brain damage that experts say was likely due to numerous brain injuries, including a complicated birth, a blow to the back of the head as a teenager while protecting a classmate from an attack, and repeated trauma from severe sports-related head injuries.
Stanko was not a danger to prison staff or other inmates and used his years on death row productively to repent for his crimes, seek God’s forgiveness, help other inmates and write about his experiences, the petition continued.
Sources:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/06/12/john-hanson-execution-mary-bowles-tulsa-oklahoma/84159822007/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuABpPwygAI&t=5425s
https://www.chronicleonline.com/news/national/south-carolina-executes-a-man-serving-death-sentences-in-2-separate-murders/article_b3680692-fba8-53f0-92f4-4b7e70b16494.html
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stop-the-execution-of-stephen-stanko-in-south-carolina