A day after Idaho prison’s system advised that it is again ready to perform a lethal injection, an Ada County judge issued the latest death warrant for Thomas Creech, the state’s longest-serving death row prisoner, and scheduled him for another execution.
Creech, 74, is now set to be executed on Nov. 13. If fulfilled, the execution would be Idaho’s first in more than a dozen years. Prison officials called off Creech’s planned execution earlier this year when for nearly an hour they were unable to locate a suitable vein for an IV to inject him with the lethal chemicals.
In turn, he became the first prisoner in Idaho to survive an execution attempt, and just the sixth to survive one by lethal injection in U.S. history, according to the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
Creech was returned to death row following his failed February execution and has awaited the state’s next move for nearly eight months. During that time, he alleged in a lawsuit that he has suffered a number of health conditions as a result of the execution attempt and argued a repeat execution would represent cruel and unusual punishment.
Ada County District Judge Jason Scott dismissed Creech’s case last month, and also signed his death warrant Wednesday.
“I laid on that table and fully expected to die that day,” Creech told the Idaho Statesman in phone interview from the prison in June.
“And actually, to be honest with you, I still feel like I’m dead and this is just the afterlife.”
Three of the other five U.S. prisoners who survived a failed lethal injection later died of natural causes.
In the other two cases, both in Alabama, the prisoners were executed this year by the novel method of nitrogen asphyxiation, including one last month.
Idaho’s prison system will now pursue a central line IV to inject a prisoner rather than a standard IV, known as peripheral access, if needed.
The execution team was not previously trained to insert a central line, which accesses a person’s body through the internal jugular in the neck, a femoral vein in the upper thigh or a subclavian vein in the chest.
With the state’s revised approach to the execution process, prison officials will again attempt next month to satisfy Creech’s decades-old death sentence for murdering a fellow maximum security prisoner in 1981.
Creech was previously found guilty of murdering two men in Valley County in 1974. In addition, Creech was convicted of two other murders — one in Oregon and one in California — after his initial Idaho murder convictions. He’s also suspected of perhaps as many as dozens of other murders across the western U.S. and is commonly described as a “serial killer” by state officials.
Creech’s newest death warrant, served to him at the prison Wednesday morning, is his 13th since he was first sentenced to death in 1976. He avoided execution the first 11 times until the failed lethal injection in February.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
