Judge temporarily halts Idaho’s plan to execute serial killer Thomas Creech after first attempt was botched

A federal judge has temporarily halted the planned execution of an Idaho man on death row whose first lethal injection attempt was botched earlier this year.

Thomas Eugene Creech was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Nov. 13 – roughly nine months after the state first tried and failed to execute him. Execution team members tried eight locations in Creech’s arms and legs on Feb. 28 but could not find a viable vein to deliver the lethal drug.

U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow issued the stay this week to allow 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 seeking to stop him from being put to death.

The Idaho Department of Correction 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 the written copies of their arguments with the court.

“Per IDOC policy, Mr. Creech has been returned to his previous housing assignment in J-Block and execution preparations have been suspended,” department public information officer Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic said in a statement.

Creech, 74, is the state’s longest-serving person on death row. He has been in prison for half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. 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 cold case in San Bernardino County, connecting the 1974 murder of Daniel Walker to Creech, CBS Los Angeles reported.

Creech was already serving a life term when he beat another person in prison with him, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981 – the crime for which he was to be executed. He was sentenced to death by a judge in 1982, who found after several resentencings that “the protection of society demands that Thomas Eugene Creech receive the death penalty.” 

In the decades since, Creech has become known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as a generally well-behaved person who sometimes writes poetry. His bid for clemency before the last execution attempt found support from a former warden at the penitentiary, prison staffers who recounted how he wrote them poems of support or condolence and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.

After the last execution attempt failed, the Idaho Department of Correction announced it would use new protocols for lethal injection when execution team members are unable to place a peripheral IV line, close to the surface of the skin. The new policy allows the execution team to place a central venous catheter, a more complex and invasive process that involves using the deeper, large veins of the neck, groin, chest or upper arm to run a catheter deep inside a person’s body until it reaches the heart.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Creech would be just the fourth person executed in Idaho since 1976.