Executioners tried at least eight times to insert an intravenous
line in Thomas Eugene Creech, a convicted serial killer who has
been in prison since 1974, Josh Tewalt, director of the Idaho
Department of Correction, said at a press conference.
For nearly an hour, they tried inserting the line in "multiple
limbs and appendages" after strapping Creech to a gurney, Tewalt
said.
"It was a vein quality issue," he said at the Idaho Maximum
Security Institution, a few hours after the U.S. Supreme Court
had rejected Creech's petition for a stay of execution.
Among other arguments, Creech's lawyers said that Idaho's
secrecy around its lethal-injection protocol made it impossible
for him to weigh whether the state was violating a
constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Multiple U.S. states that carry out executions have faced
similar problems in finding veins in aging or overweight
prisoners, or struggled to find the required drugs. This has
prompted state lawmakers to revive older methods, such as firing
squads, or develop new ones, such as Alabama's pioneering use
last month of nitrogen to asphyxiate a prisoner.
Idaho planned to let Creech's death warrant expire, and Tewalt
said it was not clear whether the state would pursue a new
warrant at a later date.
Creech's lawyers said in a statement they were "angered but not
surprised" by the botched execution attempt.
"This is what happens when unknown individuals with unknown
training are assigned to carry out an execution," the Federal
Defender Service of Idaho said. "This is precisely the kind of
mishap we warned the State and the Courts could happen when
attempting to execute one of the country's oldest death-row
inmates in circumstances completely shielded in secrecy despite
a well-known history of getting drugs from shady sources."
Creech was convicted of murdering five people in the 1970s
before being sent to prison, and then sentenced to death by a
judge after murdering another prisoner, David Jensen, in the
maximum-security facility where he was held.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York)
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