At ten o'clock on the morning of February 28, 2024, the Idaho Department of Correction began the first execution the state had attempted in twelve years. The prisoner was Thomas Eugene Creech, seventy-three, the longest-serving man on Idaho's death row. Over the next hour the medical team tried eight times to set an intravenous line, putting needles into his hands, his feet and his legs, and each time the vein collapsed. His lawyers had warned that his age, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and edema could make his veins unusable. Shortly after eleven the director, Josh Tewalt, consulted the team leader and called it off. Creech was taken back to his cell, the witnesses were led out, and the death warrant expired at the end of the day.
The sentence the state had tried to carry out was for a killing inside prison. In 1981, while serving life, Creech beat a fellow inmate, David Dale Jensen, to death; the state said he used a sock filled with batteries. Jensen was younger and physically disabled. Creech pleaded guilty and in January 1983 a judge, not a jury, sentenced him to death. He has since said that he fought Jensen in self-defense and that the weapon belonged to another prisoner, whose name was on the sock.
He was already a convicted killer by then. Born in 1950 in Ohio, he spent his twenties drifting through the western states, and in 1974 two men, Edward T. Arnold and John W. Bradford, were shot dead in Idaho. He was convicted of both murders and sentenced to death on March 25, 1976, and the sentences became life terms when Idaho's mandatory death penalty was struck down. The governor's office counts four murder convictions against him before Jensen, including cases in other states. Over the years he also told investigators he had killed dozens of people, in accounts that ran to contract killings, gang murders and human sacrifice, and detectives in several states looked into them. None produced a charge.
By 2024 the case had become an argument about time. At a clemency hearing that January, his supporters included the judge who had sentenced him to death, the prosecutor who had sought it, the prison warden and many of the staff who had guarded him, and a relative of one of the men he was accused of killing. He had married LeAnn Creech in prison in 1998. Prosecutors showed the Commission of Pardons and Parole a photograph of a sock labeled with Creech's name, and told the commissioners he had killed a man named Daniel Walker in California, a killing for which he was never charged. His lawyers later accused them of presenting the sock as if it were the murder weapon. One commissioner recused himself and the remaining six split three to three, which under Idaho law meant no recommendation of clemency.
After the failed execution Idaho rewrote its protocol to let the team run a central line through the large veins of the neck, groin, chest or upper arm, spent some $300,000 on a new preparation room and nearly a million dollars in all on a facility that could also serve a firing squad, bought $100,000 in drugs, and set a second date, November 13, 2024. In October the parole commission refused him a second clemency hearing, and the Ninth Circuit removed the federal judge assigned to his misconduct claim because of her close friendship with one of the prosecutors. Her replacement, Judge G. Murray Snow of Arizona, stayed the execution on November 6 to consider that claim and the argument that a second attempt would be double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment. "I'm not going to rush justice in a case like this," he said.
The failure changed Idaho law. In March 2025 Governor Brad Little signed a bill making the firing squad the state's primary method of execution from July 1, 2026, with lethal injection as the backup, and in May 2025 the Department of Correction paused all executions while it built the chamber. Legislators who backed the change pointed to what had happened in the execution room with Creech, and lawyers for other Idaho defendants cited it as evidence that the state had no humane way to carry out a death sentence.