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. The new death warrant says Creech will be executed at 10 a.m. on Nov. 13.
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that as far as is known, Idaho would be the first state to try to execute someone a second time using the same method tried during an earlier botched attempt. She noted that two Alabama inmates — Kenneth Smith and Alan Miller — were executed this year after prior failed attempts, but in both cases, the second try used a different method: nitrogen gas.
''Any time there is a botched execution and the public are not given a full and meaningful understanding of what went wrong, it prompts additional concerns,'' she said. ''We know Mr. Creech's execution failed because the execution team could not access a vein, but we have not received any complete information from the Department of Correction about why that happened or what steps have been taken to prevent a similar mistake from happening in the future. Instead, we see them pivoting to a new method of accessing a vein.''
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.