Death warrant signed. Longest-serving Idaho death row inmate set for November execution
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Kevin Fixler, Idaho Statesman
BOISE (Idaho Statesman) —
An Ada County judge issued a death warrant Thursday afternoon for Thomas Creech, the state’s longest-serving death row inmate, setting his execution for next month.
Creech, 73, has spent roughly 44 years on death row after multiple murder convictions, the most recent after his guilty plea for killing another inmate in May 1981.
Judge Jason D. Scott of Idaho’s 4th Judicial District signed the death warrant that scheduled Creech to be put to death on Nov. 8, according to a copy of the document obtained by the Idaho Statesman from the Idaho attorney general’s office.
After passage of a new law last year, the state permits executions by lethal injection, with a firing squad serving as the backup method. However, the Idaho Department of Correction said in a Thursday evening press release that prison officials have secured the drugs necessary to carry out a lethal injection but provided no additional details.
Besides providing a copy of the death warrant, the attorney general’s office declined to comment, citing Creech’s case falling within the jurisdiction of Ada County.
A spokesperson for the nonprofit Federal Defender Services of Idaho, which represents Creech and the majority of the state’s death row inmates, did not immediately respond to a Statesman request for comment.
Creech has been incarcerated in Idaho since the murders of two men in Valley County in November 1974. A judge sentenced Creech to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life in prison after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled death sentences must be determined by a jury.
Creech, however, later pleaded guilty to first-degree murder after killing fellow inmate David Jensen in 1981 while they were housed in maximum security prison. A jury sentenced Creech to death, and he was returned to death row later that year.
After Creech’s 1974 conviction in Idaho, he also pleaded guilty in 1979 to a murder in Oregon in 1974, but his sentence in Idaho superseded the later conviction in the neighboring state.
Idaho has not put an inmate to death since July 2012, when it executed convicted murderer Richard Leavitt by lethal injection.
The state has attempted to execute convicted double-murderer Gerald Pizzuto three times since 2021, most recently in March. Pizzuto, 67, is the second-longest tenured inmate on Idaho’s death row, serving there since 1986. But state prison officials have been unable to put Pizzuto to death in part because they have been unable obtain the drugs needed to perform a lethal injection according to state guidelines.