Will Idaho Push Forward With One of the Rarest and Most Horrible Types of Executions?

The state of Idaho tried to kill Thomas Creech once. It failed. It now wants a second chance.

Last week, a state judge gave the state the green light. This decision is grotesque and is made all the more so because it masks the cruelty of a second execution behind a smoke screen of legalisms.

Creech, one of the country’s longest-serving death-row inmates, has a lengthy and troubling criminal record, having been convicted, as the Associated Press notes, of “five murders in three states and suspected of several more.” He is on Idaho’s death row because, while he was already serving a life term, he “beat a fellow inmate, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981.”

Creech pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the Jensen case. An Idaho trial judge found that he had “exhibited utter disregard for human life” and sentenced him to death.

Idaho intended to carry out that sentence months ago, Feb. 28, at 10 in the morning.

The AP reports, “The execution team was made up entirely of volunteers.” According to the story, for nearly an hour, “Thomas Eugene Creech lay strapped to a table … as medical team members poked and prodded at his arms and legs, hands and feet, trying to find a vein through which they could end his life.”

Three team members “tried eight times to establish an IV. … In some cases, they couldn’t access the vein, and in others they could but had concerns about vein quality.”

At 10:58 a.m., the prison warden told them to give up and stopped Creech’s execution. He was returned to his cell.

No state is required to carry out a second execution attempt after failing the first time. Whether Creech gets another trip to the death chamber is entirely up to the state of Idaho, which must obtain a new death warrant.

It is not the first state to have to make this choice.

Almost 80 years ago, Louisiana faced a similar choice when its effort to electrocute Willie Francis was botched. When the state announced its intention to try again, Francis went to court to attempt to stop it. His case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As the court........

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