Idaho’s failed effort earlier this year to execute a prisoner for the first time in 12 years, stunning top officials, has again paralyzed the state’s ability to carry out the death penalty and left Thomas Creech, death row’s longest-tenured member, bracing for what may come next. Creech, 73, incarcerated for nearly 50 years , was strapped to a bed in the Idaho Department of Correction’s execution chamber at the maximum security prison in February. There, , the prison system’s clandestine three-member execution team searched for a proper vein, poking him with needles attached to lethal chemicals ready to enter Creech’s body but , and state prison leadership called off his execution.
Creech still lives and breathes today. In the 3 1/2 months since Idaho’s first-ever , Creech, too, remains rattled by the , which had him questioning reality, he said this week in a phone interview with the Idaho Statesman. “I laid on that table and fully expected to die that day.
And actually, to be honest with you, I still feel like I’m dead and this is just the afterlife,” Creech said from the prison south of Boise. “They laid me on the table, putting needles in my arm, and the worst of everything was I looked at my wife, I seen her sitting there, total devastation and fear in her beautiful face. And I never want to see that again.
” That uncertainty of what may follow has taken a toll on his psyche, he said, and also raised constitutional rights questions over whether the.