No one seems to do as much in the United States to discredit the death penalty as the states that maintain this punishment in force.
Idaho, after a twelve-year hiatus, carried out this Wednesday another of those execution attempts that causes horror due to its inhumanity and once again calls into question the use of lethal injection. Authorities stopped the trial against serial killer Thomas Eugene Creech after almost an hour and eight failed attempts with punctures in various parts of his body to connect an intravenous line.
Creech, 73, has spent half a century in prison and is one of the longest-serving inmates in the United States on death row. He is convicted of five murders in three different states and is the suspect in a few more. He was already serving a life sentence when he beat to death a fellow inmate, David Dale Jensen, who was 22 years old on that date in 1981. This is the case for which he was going to be executed in the capital prison.
The prisoner was transferred on a stretcher from the cell to the execution chamber of the Kuna maximum security center to breathe his last, at ten in the morning (local time). On this occasion, the team of executioners was made up of volunteers, the Idaho Department of Corrections reported.
There were three teams and all their members were trained to insert the track. Their identities were kept secret. They wore face coverings with white balaclavas and navy blue medical caps to hide their faces.
These three teams tried eight times to establish an intravenous connection without success, explained the center’s director, Josh Tewalt, in a press conference after the failure. In some cases they could not access the veins and in others they could but they were discarded due to the poor quality of those veins.
They stabbed the prisoner in vain in his arms, legs, hands and feet. According to witnesses, who included six state officials, Attorney General Raul Labrador and representatives of four media outlets to attest, there was a moment when a member of the medical team left the room to go get more supplies.
The sheriff announced that he was stopping the execution 58 minutes after it began. The prisoner returned to the cell alive when he had already said goodbye to this world.
The corrections department indicated that this particular execution order was about to expire and that it should now consider the next step. While other medical procedures could allow execution, and even the firing squad, approved again in Idaho in 2023, the state is aware of the ban on cruel punishment established by the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, Tewalt recalled.
Creech’s attorneys immediately filed a motion for a stay in district court. The lawyers argued that the botched attempt demonstrates the department’s inability to carry out “a humane and constitutional execution.”
The court granted that request after authorities confirmed that they would not try to execute him under the current order, so they will have to obtain another one if they want to carry out the sentence.
“This is what happens when unknown individuals with unknown preparation are assigned to carry out an execution,” the state public defender service noted in a statement. “This is the type of mishap that we alerted the government and the courts about that could occur when executing one of the country’s oldest death row inmates,” he insisted.
Witnesses explained that Creech frequently looked towards his relatives and the rest of those present, who were sitting in different rooms. His arms were tied, but she often extended her fingers toward his loved ones. On one occasion he seemed to say “I love you” to someone. Once the execution was stopped, the bailiff approached him and whispered to him for several minutes, squeezing his arm.
His lawyers had filed a series of urgent appeals before the execution in the hope of preventing it. They argued that the clemency hearing was unfair, that it was unconstitutional to execute him because he received the sentence from a judge instead of a jury and that the state had not offered enough information about how he had obtained the lethal drugs or who supplied them.
The courts found no cause for leniency, however, and a final appeal to the US Supreme Court was denied shortly before the scheduled execution time. On Tuesday night he was with his wife, who is the mother of a correctional officer, and his supposed last meal consisted of fried chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes and ice cream.
Born in Ohio, Creech has remained locked up in Idaho for most of his existence due to a long criminal history. In 1973 he was acquitted of a murder in Tucson (Arizona), although authorities believe he committed it. He used the decedent’s bank documents to move to Oregon. In 1974 he was convicted of murders in that state and in California, where he traveled while obtaining a weekend pass to a psychiatric hospital.
That same year he was arrested in Idaho after killing two house painters who had accommodated him and his girlfriend at the time in their car while they were hitchhiking. Already sentenced to life in prison, he killed inmate Jensen, a disabled person serving for car theft.
At the clemency hearing, his daughter, who was four years old when he died, recounted how painful it had been to grow up without her father.
Prosecutor Jill Longhorst did not deny that this inmate can be charming, but she clarified that he is a psychopath lacking remorse.
But people who support Creech’s cause argued that he is a different man from that criminal thanks in large part to his marriage. Several former prison officials noted that Creech was known for writing poetry and how well he treated him.
His life makes for a novel with a lot of blood and his failed execution offers him material for a horror story about the dead returning from the grave.
