There are 27 states that currently authorize capital punishment in the United States, including Idaho. Three of those states, Pennsylvania, California, and Oregon, have a moratorium on executions.
Eight people are currently on Idaho’s death row. Including one female, Robin Row, and Idaho’s longest-serving death row prisoner, Thomas Creech, who was sentenced four decades ago in 1983.
“The death penalty has been taking longer and longer and it's gotten longer over time,” said Robert Dunham the executive director of The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit that does not take a stance for or against capital punishment. “In 2000, the Bureau of Justice Statistics said that the average amount of time that an individual was on death row was 7.7 years. At the end of 2020. The Bureau of Justice Statistics said the average was 19.4 years.”
L. Lamont Anderson, the chief of the Capitol Litigation Unit in the Idaho Attorney general’s office, explained the legal process of execution.
“If a death sentence is imposed, then they have what we call post-conviction relief,” Anderson said.
From there, it can go through a complex route of higher courts, with some making it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
“Within that timeframe, you can have successive post-conviction petitions that get the federal proceedings sidetracked. And so, to do the review that is involved, at least in Idaho, it just takes a very long time,” Anderson said.
So long, that Anderson is still working on some cases he first started when he took the job 25 years ago.
“We have eight death sentence murders. And less than half of those are what you would call new cases. The others are old, from the 80s 90s, early 2000s,” Anderson said.
In 2014, the Idaho Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations conducted a study of the financial costs of the death penalty. The evaluation found that the death penalty costs more than sentencing a person to life without parole because capital cases take longer to resolve than non-capital cases.
The last time Idaho executed someone on death row was executed in Idaho was in 2012 when Rochard Leavitt was put to death by lethal injection. His execution came just seven months after Paul Rhoades was executed.
“It was very intense, it was very challenging. There's so many aspects that play into it,” said Brent Reinke, the Twin Falls County Commissioner, who was serving as the director of the Idaho Department of Corrections when the two executions took place.
“In that time period, it was very difficult to be able to acquire the necessary drugs to be able to carry out the execution,” Reinke said. “And so that was a very daunting task, working with a lot of other states and a lot of other jurisdictions, trying to understand where we might be able to acquire those, how that might be done. And then we did a tremendous amount of rehearsing, leading up to that particular event.”
Obtaining those drugs sparked controversy and a call for more transparency after reports came out saying that states, like Idaho, sent employees to pharmacies in other states, with suitcases full of cash to pick up the drugs to be used in the execution. Bringing up questions about the lethal injection drug suppliers, as well as the nature of the drug and its efficacy.
“Idaho also has as a very serious issue, the question of secrecy and public accountability,” Dunham said. “The state has said that it's had difficulty in obtaining execution drugs. But when you look at the state's practices, you understand that it's engaged in cloak and dagger activities in trying to obtain the drugs.”
Last month, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed a bill into law that increases the secrecy surrounding Idaho’s lethal injection drugs. Which stems from what happened nearly a decade ago. Supporters of the bill said it is the only way Idaho can continue carrying out lawful executions because no suppliers of the chemicals will sell the drugs to the state without guaranteed confidentiality.
Looking back at the executions, Reinke called them the most difficult task someone can handle in the Idaho criminal justice system.
‘It's something that is permanent, and we want to do that, as I've indicated, with as much professionalism, dignity, and respect, which is what our governor asked of us. That's what we provided, and I'm very proud of the men and women that carry that out,” Reinke said. “We made sure that we dotted every I and crossed every T so that we could carry out as the governor wished.”
27 апр 2022
