“The worst ones was when they got down to my ankles,” Thomas Creech said in his first interview since he was wheeled into the execution chamber in February, as reported in The New York Times. “I was thinking the whole time that this is really it. I’m dead. This is my day to die.” Creech, 73, has been imprisoned in Idaho for nearly 50 years, was convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more while. But Creech’s execution did not go as planned. 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.
Creech’s tale is 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 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.