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, per the AP. Thomas Eugene Creech was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on 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 drug. US 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 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," an official said. Creech, 74, is the state's longest-serving inmate on death row. He has been in prison for half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. He was already serving a life term when he beat a fellow inmate, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981—the crime for which he was to be executed.
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, and the judge who sentenced Creech to death. After the last execution attempt failed, the IDOC 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. They can now use 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. (More execution stories.)
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