A Death Row Prisoner Tells of Living Through a Botched Execution

At 73, Thomas Creech is one of the few people to have survived a failed attempt at executing the death penalty. Now he waits to see if the state will try again.

Thomas Creech had been imprisoned in Idaho for nearly 50 years, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more, when he was wheeled into an execution chamber in February.

For nearly an hour, medical workers at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution outside Boise struggled to insert an intravenous line that was needed to pump a deadly drug into his bloodstream. Starting with his arms, then his hands and finally his legs, they tried and failed to get a needle into a suitable vein. The proceedings were called off.

“The worst ones was when they got down to my ankles,” Mr. Creech said in his first interview since the bungled procedure. “I was thinking the whole time that this is really it. I’m dead. This is my day to die.”

The prisoner, 73, is the most recent survivor of a botched execution, part of a troubling trend at prisons across the United States as they face a challenging combination of untrained executioners, difficulty in securing lethal drugs and an aging death row population.

In the interview, Mr. Creech described what it was like to endure the repeated needle jabs, knowing that any of them — if successful — could mean he would be dead within minutes. He described fear, pain, and his commitment to keeping his focus on his wife, who was sitting just a few feet away in the witness room, behind a glass panel.

In the last five years, there have been at least nine botched executions in five states, most of them involving execution team members failing to access a vein, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. In at least one case, executioners were finally able to access a prisoner’s vein and complete the execution only by cutting into his arm. In others, the executions were abandoned.