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A day after Idaho’s prison system announced it was ready to administer a lethal injection again, an Ada County judge issued the latest death sentence against Thomas Creech, the state’s longest-serving death row inmate, and scheduled him for another execution.
Creech, 74, will now be executed on November 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 after they could not find a suitable vein for an IV to inject him with the deadly chemicals for nearly an hour. In turn, he became the first inmate in Idaho to survive an execution attempt, and only the sixth to survive an execution attempt 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 after his botched execution in February and has been waiting for the state’s next move for nearly eight months. During that time, he claimed in a lawsuit that he had suffered a number of health problems as a result of the execution attempt and argued that a repeat execution would be 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 down on that table expecting to die that day,” Creech told the Idaho Statesman in a telephone interview from prison in June. “And actually, to be honest, I still feel like I’m dead and this is just the afterlife.”
Three of the other five American prisoners who survived a botched lethal injection later died of natural causes. In the other two cases, both in Alabama, the prisoners were executed this year by the new method of nitrogen asphyxiation, including one last month.
The Idaho prison system will now pursue a central line IV to inject an inmate instead of a standard IV, known as peripheral access, if necessary. The execution team had not previously been trained to insert a central line that provides access to a person’s body through the internal jugular vein in the neck, a femoral vein in the thigh or a subclavian vein in the chest.
With the state’s revised approach to the execution process, prison officials will again try next month to carry out Creech’s decades-long death sentence for the 1981 murder of a fellow maximum-security inmate. Creech was previously found guilty of killing 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 first murder convictions in Idaho. He is also suspected of perhaps dozens of other murders in the western US and is commonly described by state officials as a “serial killer.”
Creech’s latest death sentence, handed down to him in prison Wednesday morning, is his thirteenth since he was first sentenced to death in 1976. He avoided execution the first eleven times until the botched lethal injection in February.
