50 years on death row

[Ravenshire]

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.

50 years in our penal system is horrible to contemplate on it's own. Add confinement to a cell no bigger than the average American bathroom for 23-hours of every day, with no way out but a visit to an enclosed yard* with no one else around, and you have cruel and unusual punishment, torture to be honest.

The man committed heinous crimes and should remain segregated from society for the remainder of his natural life. That he has mellowed, at least in my eye, should have no bearing on his sentence, but perhaps on the conditions of his segregation. The brutality that is death row serves no purpose but to torture those we have deemed beneath contempt. While some of us will revel in their suffering, I like to think the majority of us find it abhorrent to treat anyone with the casual disregard of Americas penal system, especially the various death rows around the country.

*On some death rows, the "yard" is a patch of dirt not much bigger then a basketball key, completely separate from the regular prison yard, surrounded with high, sheer walls, and roofed completely (or nearly so), in order to aggravate the feelings of confinement and hopelessness, and the suffering they bring.

As a side note: The worst death rows are typically in the most christian states. Of course, it's getting to the point where only christian states deem state sanctioned revenge killing as suitable punishment for any crimes.