BOISE, Idaho — Idaho prison officials will attempt to execute the state’s longest-serving death row inmate next month using new protocols after botching the first attempt several months ago.
A judge issued a death warrant for Thomas Eugene Creech Wednesday morning, one day after the Idaho Department of Correction announced it had renovated its execution chamber to allow the execution team to insert catheters deep into the neck, groin, chest or arms of inmates if 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 lethal drug.
Creech’s attorneys with the Federal Defender Services of Idaho said the state was “sacrificing common decency and humanity” in its haste to try again to kill him.
“We are heartbroken and angered that Idaho would try again to execute Thomas Creech using virtually the same process and team and executioners, and before conducting any official review of what led to the botched attempt to take his life earlier this year,” the defense team wrote in a press release. “The level of recklessness puts Idaho in a class by itself, as other states that botched executions took significant steps to examine what went wrong before trying again.”
Creech, 74, has been in prison half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. He was already serving a life term when he beat a fellow inmate, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981 — the crime for which he was to be executed.
In the decades since, Creech has become known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as just “Tom,” a man who occasionally writes poetry and is generally considered well-behaved. His bid for clemency before the last execution attempt found support from a former warden at the penitentiary, prison staffers who recounted how he wrote them poems of support or condolence and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.
If the scheduled execution moves forward on Nov. 13, it will be Idaho’s fifth such effort since capital punishment resumed in 1976. Keith Eugene Wells was executed by lethal injection in 1994 after giving up his appeals and asking to be put to death. Paul Ezra Rhoades was executed in 2011, and Richard Albert Leavitt was executed in 2012.