A federal judge has temporarily halted execution plans for an Idaho man whose first lethal injection was attempted. broke down earlier this year,
Thomas Eugene Creech He was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on November 13 – nearly nine months after the state first tried and failed to execute him. Members of the execution team tried on Creech's arms and legs in eight places on February 28, but could not find any viable vein to deliver the lethal drug.
US District Judge G. Murray Snow issued a stay this week to give the court enough time to consider Creech's claims that prosecutors acted improperly during his clemency hearing. Creech's defense team also has other legal cases underway to prevent him from receiving the death penalty.
The Idaho Department of Corrections declined to comment on the postponement because the lawsuit is ongoing, but said it will take at least until the end of the month for both sides to file written copies of their arguments with the court.
“In accordance with IDOC policy, Mr. Creech has been returned to his previous housing assignment in J-Block and preparation for execution has been suspended,” Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic, the department's public information officer, said in a statement.
Creech, 74, is the state's longest-serving death row person. He has been in prison for half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several murders. According to court filings, Creech admitted to killing or participating in the murders of at least 26 people.
In January, investigators in California closed a decades-old case in San Bernardino County that linked Creech to the 1974 murder of Daniel Walker, CBS Los Angeles. informed,
Creech was already serving a life sentence when he beat to death another man in prison with him in 1981, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen – the crime for which he was scheduled to be hanged. He was sentenced to death in 1982 by a judge who, after numerous complaints, found that “the safety of society demands that Thomas Eugene Creech receive the death penalty.”
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In the decades that followed, Creech became known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as a generally well-behaved man who occasionally wrote poetry. His bid for clemency before the final execution attempt was supported by a former prison warden, prison staff who described how they wrote poems of support or condolence for him, and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.
After the last execution attempt failed, the Idaho Department of Corrections announced it would use new protocols for lethal injections when execution team members are unable to place a peripheral IV line close to the skin surface. The new policy allows the execution team to place a central venous catheter, a more complex and invasive procedure that involves running a catheter deep inside a person's body into a deep, large vein in the neck, groin, chest or upper arm. Involves using until it is reached. Heart.
according to Death Penalty Information CenterCreech would be the fourth person executed in Idaho since 1976.