(February 25, 2024 at 1:09 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:Quote:BOISE, Idaho (AP) — For nearly 50 years, Idaho’s prison staffers have been serving Thomas Eugene Creech three meals a day, checking on him during rounds and taking him to medical appointments.
This Wednesday, some of Idaho’s prison staffers will be asked to kill him. Barring any last-minute stay, the 73-year-old, one of the nation’s longest-serving death row inmates, will be executed by lethal injection for killing a fellow prisoner with a battery-filled sock in 1981.
Creech’s killing of David Jensen, a young, disabled man who was serving time for car theft, was his last in a broad path of destruction that saw Creech convicted of five murders in three states. He is also suspected of at least a half-dozen others.
But now, decades later, Creech is mostly known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as just “Tom,” a generally well-behaved old-timer with a penchant for poetry. His unsuccessful bid for clemency even found support from a former warden at the penitentiary, prison staffers who recounted how he wrote them poems of support or condolence and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.
https://apnews.com/article/creech-idaho-...45fb6e5ebb
I'm not sure what I think of this. I'm generally against the death penalty anyway, but he is a serial killer, after all. But does his growing mellow with age justify the support mentioned in the article above? Another part of me eels that his 50 years behind bars is a fate worse than death anyway.
#1 2024 - 1981 is 41 years.
I am against the death penalty for the simple reason that the state can spend virtually indefinite money on prosecution but the accused are limited to mostly public defenders who do not have the time to mount a proper defense. But if one wants to talk about taxes. It costs far more in taxes to prosecute a death penalty case than to simply give them life without parole.
5 convictions he certainly should never leave prison. I have no sympathy for him. But I am still against the death penalty.
But for any others accused of a single death that could be anything from involuntary manslaughter but over charged, a poor person can be very easily railroaded by the system, or be so scared to falsely confess, which does happen.
The potential risk of killing an innocent person is not worth the cost. Life in prison without parole can be reversed if an innocent person is convicted.
