Idaho issues execution warrant for inmate who survived a botched attempt

BOISE, Idaho– Idaho prison officials will attempt to execute the state’s prisoners longest serving death row inmate next month use of new protocols after the first attempt failed several months ago.

A judge issued a death sentence against Thomas Eugene Creech Wednesday morning, a day after the Idaho Department of Correction announced it had renovated the execution chamber so the execution team could insert catheters deep into inmates’ necks, groins, chests or arms as they are unable to establish a standard peripheral intravenous line.

The change came after the state tried and failed to execute Creech in February. Execution team members tried eight locations in Creech’s arms and legs but could not find a viable vein to deliver the deadly drug.

Creech’s attorneys with Idaho’s Federal Defender Services said the state “sacrificed common decency and humanity” in its haste to try to kill him again.

“We are heartbroken and angry that Idaho would again attempt to execute Thomas Creech using virtually the same process, team and executioners, and before conducting an official review of what led to the failed attempt to take his life earlier this year rob,” the defense team said. wrote in a press release. “The level of recklessness puts Idaho in a league of its own, as other states allege botched executions have taken significant steps to investigate what went wrong before trying again.”

Creech, 74, has been in prison for half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of more. He was already serving a life sentence when he beat to death a fellow inmate, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, in 1981 – the crime for which he would be executed.

In the decades since, Creech has become known within the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as simply “Tom,” a man who occasionally writes poetry and is generally considered well-behaved. His bid for clemency for the last execution attempt found support from a former director of the penitentiary, from prison staff who told how he wrote them poems of support or condolence, and from the judge who sentenced Creech to death.

If the planned execution goes ahead on November 13, it will be Idaho’s fifth attempt since the death penalty resumed in 1976. Keith Eugene Wells was executed by lethal injection in 1994 after abandoning his profession and asking to be put to death. Paul Ezra Rhoades was executed in 2011 and Richard Albert Leavitt was executed in 2012.