Creech is a mass murderer who deserves no mercy. This is why we shouldn’t kill him | Opinion
During one of Thomas Creech’s appeals in 1995, Ada County Deputy Prosecutor Roger Bourne made the case for proceeding with his execution.
“If the death penalty doesn’t fit this defendant, who does it fit?” Bourne said, according to KIVI. “This defendant is a mass murderer. He has shown extreme violence while in the penitentiary. If the Legislature didn’t intend it to fit this defendant, who could it fit any better?”
Exactly right.
Creech’s known crimes are horrifying. He murdered a man in Oregon. Then in Idaho, he murdered two men who did nothing but give Creech and his girlfriend a lift. After he was imprisoned, he murdered yet another man — after he was allowed to act as a trustee, KIVI reported.
And he has confessed to dozens of other murders. Many of those confessions appear to be lies, but it seems several of them are credible. Officers at his trial testified they believed they could tie him to nine murders in total, as the AP reported at the time.
So Bourne was right: If any man deserves execution, Creech is near the top of the list. He does not deserve sympathy or mercy or a second chance.
But the state of Idaho should not execute Creech.
Killing is a dangerous habit to get into.
If you pay close attention to death penalty cases in the state of Texas, for example, which executes more people than any other, you’ll almost certainly conclude that the state has already executed several innocent people.
Idaho has had fewer chances to make that irreversible mistake because it’s a small state with very few capital crimes. But even with our few cases, we have shown that our system is easily capable of such errors.
Idaho held Charles Fain, an innocent man whom the state has subsequently paid restitution to for his wrongful imprisonment, on death row for 18 years. A few more mistakes by the court, or if Fain had decided to quit fighting, and we would have executed an innocent man.
Which is to say, we would have murdered him. That is a risk we should not take again, ever.
But Fain was convicted on scant evidence. There is no real doubt about Creech’s guilt. I am not worried we will execute an innocent man in this case — though I’m certain we eventually will, if we don’t end Idaho’s death penalty. There’s another, more basic problem with the Creech case.
The fundamental reason Idaho should not execute Creech is because execution is shameful, no matter who you’re killing or how much they have it coming.
It seems clear that the participants in the process know this implicitly.
As Kevin Fixler reported last week, the state of Idaho recently paid $50,000 for 15 grams (the weight of about six pennies) of pentobarbital to carry out Creech’s execution. Why would a small quantity of a drug first marketed in 1930 and today routinely used by veterinarians cost tens of thousands of dollars, instead of maybe a few hundred?
The same reason that a kilogram of fentanyl is cheap to produce but expensive to buy. The markup is for the disgrace that the vendor risks falling into, the risk that they will be rightly branded a death profiteer.
It’s the same reason whoever sold Idaho pentobarbital marked the purchase order with an “X” instead of their real signature. It’s the same reason Idaho has erected a regime of secrecy to cloak the identity of the vendors of lethal injection drugs — because no one will agree to supply them if they have to stand behind the deed. It’s the same reason they used to give executioners hoods.
The direct participants are not the only ones whose hands will be made dirty if Creech is executed. So will all of ours, who live in a state that permits killing to masquerade as justice.
So we should stop executing people in Idaho — not for the sake of Creech, who deserves nothing from us, but for our own.
We should stop killing because it makes us worse.
We should stop killing because it makes us more like him.