Fans of executions will can inject this news into their veins: CNN reports Tuesday though Friday will see back-to-back-to-back-back legalized killing of condemned inmates in four different states, starting with the Tuesday night Florida/Alabama double header. Sunshine State death row inmate Anthony Wainwright faces the needle for the April 1994 carjacking, rape, and brutal murder of a Lake City mom while Bama convict Greg Hunt is set to be the fifth to get NITROed for the extremely violent and depraved August 1988 beating death of a woman he had been dating for about a month.
On Thursday in Oklahoma convict John Hanson can blame all those people who didn’t show up to vote for former Vice President Kamala Harris for his predicament right before he’s put to death via lethal injection. Hanson had been in a federal prison for the last three years, safe from the gurney he’d been sentenced to in the Sooner State until the Trump Administration on January 24th sent him back to Oklahoma’s custody and to his doom. There’s some dispute over whether Hanson actually pulled the trigger to execute 77 year-old Mary Bowles in August 1999 after kidnapping her from a Tulsa mall. It may have been Hanson’s accomplice, Victor Miller, who killed Bowles and a man who was being held hostage too, so yeah, this one’s something of a close call on whether it’s justified.
The same cannot be said of the last man not standing this week. On Friday in South Carolina, Steve Stanko faces the firing squad for the 2005 murder of 74 year-old Henry Turner, who Stanko shot before stealing his truck. That’s the official crime. However Stanko was sentenced to death separately for the same-day murder of his girlfriend Laura Ling. Stanko then raped her underage daughter and slashed her throat, but the girl survived the ordeal. Stanko will not survive his.