Serial killer Thomas Creech, now 73, was sentenced to death in 1976, before Jimmy Carter became president.
On Wednesday, Creech is set to be executed in Idaho after one of the longest waits of anyone on death row. His case is an extreme example of a capital punishment system in which decades-long delays have become so common that senior citizens are being punished for crimes they committed as young adults.
“In one sense, it’s pretty hard to deal with, but I’m holding my head up,” Creech says. “Of course, my faith plays into anything I do. I don’t think anyone could go through this for 50 years and not believe in God.”
Creech has been on death row for a total of 43 years, excluding a short period in which his sentence was reduced to life.
Prosecutors and relatives of his victims say his execution is long overdue. “Thomas Creech is a manipulative serial killer who only values his own life and continues to believe he should never pay the price for his horrific crimes,” said Brandi Jensen, the daughter of a man Creech killed. “It is time to end this 43 year long nightmare.”
The average time people spent on death row before execution has been increasing since the death penalty was made legal again in 1976. It has recently hovered around 20 years.
Researchers attribute the delays, in part, to lengthier appeals and changes in laws and technology that have led many cases to be re-examined and, in some cases, sentences overturned.
Prisoners over age 60 comprise a quarter of the state-level death row population of about 2,300, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Deborah Czuba of the federal public defender’s office in Boise, which represents Creech, has two other elderly clients facing capital punishment—one an 80-year-old in California and the other a 76-year-old in Nevada. She says, "it’s hard to imagine what’s the point in executing them anymore,.
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Death penalty supporters say long waits undermine the effectiveness of the sentence and deny justice to victims. “Unfortunately, courts have allowed these cases to stretch out indefinitely,” said Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims-rights nonprofit.
The number of people sentenced to death each year in the 27 states where the penalty is legal has been failling for two decades, but it still far outnumbers the dozen or so executions taking place annually.
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