The Idaho Maximum Security Institution sits south of Boise, past the airport, out where the valley gives way to scrubland and the Snake River Canyon starts to make its long cut toward Twin Falls.1 It is not a building anyone would notice from the highway. Prisons in this country are designed to be unnoticed, which is itself a kind of statement about what the public is willing to fund and unwilling to watch. Inside, in a unit called F-Block, the state of Idaho spent more than 1.2 million dollars over roughly fourteen months building something it had not needed to build in nearly fifty years: a room designed, from the studs out, for three armed men to shoot a fourth who cannot move.2
Construction began in the spring of 2025, not long after Governor Brad Little signed House Bill 37 into law. It finished just ahead of the statute’s July 1, 2026 effective date.3 What the Department of Correction built is, by design, unremarkable to look at in the way that all the machinery of American execution is unremarkable to look at, right up until the moment it is used. There is a chair bolted to the floor, fitted with restraints at the ankles, the waist, and the arms. There is a wall between the chair and an adjoining room, with gun ports cut into it at chest height, screened until the moment of use. There is a target, roughly the size of a fist, positioned by protocol over the heart of whoever is seated in the chair. Sandbags line the wall behind the chair to catch what the target does not stop. Whether humans would stand behind those ports, or a remote-operated mechanism, was a question for later.4
Sit with the plainness of that description, because plainness is exactly what the architecture is built to defeat. A hospital room, which is what the lethal injection chamber is designed to resemble, borrows the visual grammar of healing to disguise an act of killing. The gas chamber, whether the older cyanide design or the newer nitrogen hood, borrows the grammar of a laboratory. The firing squad chamber borrows nothing. It looks like what it is: a place built for shooting a restrained person at close range. That bluntness will matter throughout this book, because it is, perversely, the method’s single honest feature and simultaneously the thing every other part of its protocol works hardest to bury.
How Idaho Got Here
Idaho has not executed many people. Since capital punishment resumed nationwide after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Gregg v. Georgia, Idaho has completed exactly three executions: Keith Wells in 1994, Paul Ezra Rhoades in November 2011, and Richard Leavitt in June 2012.5 All three died by lethal injection. For over a decade after Leavitt, nothing happened. Idaho kept sentencing people to death and kept failing, for one reason after another, to carry the sentences out.
By the early 2020s the reason had a name: the drug supply.
Pentobarbital, the barbiturate most states had come to rely on for lethal injection after European manufacturers cut off the supply of the older three-drug protocols, became increasingly difficult for corrections departments to obtain as pharmaceutical companies, facing public pressure and their own moral objections, refused to sell to prisons for the purpose of killing people. Idaho felt this acutely. Gerald Pizzuto Jr., a death row prisoner, had an execution date set for December 2022 that had to be called off because the state could not get the chemicals.6 Idaho’s corrections director, Josh Tewalt, informed the state’s Board of Correction in a memo, later filed with the court, that the department was unable to obtain the drugs and recommended letting Pizzuto’s death warrant expire.7 Legislators, watching neighboring states hit the same wall, began looking for a method the pharmaceutical industry could not choke off by refusing to sell a chemical. In 2023 Idaho passed a bill authorizing the firing squad as an alternative method, available if lethal injection proved unavailable.8 It was meant, at that point, as a backstop. Nobody involved was yet describing it as the plan. Two years later they were. After the failed execution attempt chapter two recounts, the legislature inverted the arrangement: House Bill 37, signed by Governor Little on March 12, 2025, made the firing squad Idaho’s primary method and lethal injection its fallback, effective July 1, 2026. Chapter three tells how that vote was won. This chapter stays with the room the vote required.
The Room Gets Built
Between May 2025 and June 2026, the actual work of retrofitting F-Block proceeded, though not without friction the public rarely saw. After Idaho passed its 2023 firing squad backup law and began preparing to retrofit F-Block, the Department of Correction discovered that contractors willing to do the physical construction work were hard to find; multiple firms, according to the department’s own later statements, declined to bid on a project explicitly tied to executions.9 That reluctance delayed the buildout for years and is itself a data point worth sitting with: the people whose job is pouring concrete and running electrical conduit, professionals with no stated position on capital punishment, took one look at what they were being asked to build and said no. The state eventually found contractors who would do the work. Construction finished in the weeks before the July 1, 2026 deadline.
The Department of Correction also finalized, ahead of that date, a training and qualification protocol for the trained, POST-certified law enforcement officers who would staff the shooting team.10 Chapter eleven walks through those qualifications in detail. For now it is enough to note the shape of the requirement: a team of six officers, of whom three fire; three years of Peace Officer Standards and Training certification, a clean disciplinary record regarding firearms and use of force for the preceding twelve months, and a marksmanship test requiring one hundred percent accuracy from a minimum of seven yards against a target built to the same specifications as the one that will be pinned to a living man’s chest.
What July 1 Actually Changed
It is worth being exact about what the law did and did not do, because a great deal of the coverage around Idaho’s transition, and no small amount of the misinformation Snopes and other fact-checking organizations had to run down in the weeks before the effective date, blurred an important distinction.11 House Bill 37 did not abolish lethal injection in Idaho. It reversed the hierarchy. Where lethal injection had been the default and the firing squad the fallback since 2023, as of July 1, 2026, the firing squad is the default and lethal injection becomes available only if the firing squad proves impossible, unconstitutional, or otherwise unavailable. This is a distinction with real teeth. It means that when the next death warrant is signed in Idaho, whether for Thomas Creech, for Robin Row, or for any of the other six people on the state’s row, the default assumption written into law is that the state will use the gun. Lethal injection has become the method Idaho reaches for when its first choice is unavailable, an inversion nowhere else in the country has made.
Idaho did not do this quietly, and it did not do it apologetically. State officials, in interviews around the July 1 transition, described the department as “ready” to carry out the new procedure.12 There was no ambiguity in the tone, no sense of a state backing reluctantly into an unpleasant necessity. This was presented as competence, as problem-solving, as a legislature and a corrections department that had identified a failure point in their machinery of death and engineered around it.
The Switch, and the Man Holding It
There is a step in the statute that almost no account of Idaho’s new law describes, and it changes what the word primary means. Section 19-2716 does not simply announce that the state shoots people now. It builds a switch and it puts one man’s hand on it.13
Not later than five days after a court issues a death warrant, the director of the Idaho Department of Correction must determine whether execution by firing squad is available and certify that determination by affidavit to the court that issued the warrant. If he certifies that it is available, the method is the firing squad. If he does not certify, or if he simply fails to file, the method is lethal injection.14
Read that last clause again. The gun is not automatic. It turns on a sworn document filed inside a five-day window, and the director’s silence is enough by itself to put the needle back. Idaho’s primary method of execution is primary in the way a default setting is primary. It is what happens when nobody does anything.
This matters for every promise Part Two takes up and it matters most for certainty. The state told its legislature that the firing squad was sure. It then wrote a statute in which the sureness of the method is established not by evidence but by an affidavit, produced on a deadline, by the same office that told the public Thomas Creech’s failed execution was the process working as intended. No standard governs the determination. The statute does not say what makes a firing squad available or unavailable, does not require the director to explain his reasoning and does not provide for anyone to contest it. It requires only that he decide and sign, within five days.
The same section removes the ordinary check on how he decides. Subsection (6) gives the director the power to set the procedures for any execution and exempts those procedures from Idaho’s Administrative Procedure Act. That exemption is not incidental. It is what House Bill 803 secured in March of 2026, and chapter thirteen traces what it cost to get it. The result is a method selected by one official under no announced standard, carried out under procedures that same official writes without public rulemaking.15
One practical note, because it has already misled people. The commercial legal databases have been slow to catch up. As of this writing at least one widely used service still displays the 2023 text of section 19-2716, in which the director certifies the availability of lethal injection and the firing squad is what happens if he cannot. That is the law Idaho repealed. A reader who checks Idaho’s execution statute on a database rather than on the legislature’s own site will find the hierarchy exactly backward.16
Retroactive by Design
One further legal detail deserves emphasis before this chapter turns to the public’s confused reception of it, because it is easy to miss and it matters enormously for the eight people named in chapter ten. House Bill 37 applies to every execution carried out after its July 1, 2026 effective date, regardless of when the underlying death sentence was originally imposed.17 This is not a law that applies only to new capital convictions handed down after the statute took effect. Thomas Creech was sentenced to death for the killing that put him on the row in 1983. Gerald Pizzuto was sentenced in 1986. Both men were sentenced under a legal regime that specified lethal injection, or in Creech’s earliest history, methods that predate even that. Neither man, nor the jury that sentenced him, contemplated the firing squad as the method that would eventually be used. House Bill 37 reaches backward across that gap without exception, applying its new default to every person on Idaho’s row the moment the statute’s effective date arrived, a retroactive sweep that a reader unfamiliar with execution-method jurisprudence might assume would raise its own distinct constitutional question, separate from the method’s reliability. Courts have generally held that changes to execution method, as opposed to changes to the sentence itself, do not implicate the constitutional protections against retroactive punishment, since the underlying sentence, death, remains unchanged; only its manner of implementation is altered. Whatever the doctrinal soundness of that distinction, and this book takes no position on it, the practical effect for Idaho’s eight condemned residents is the same: none of them chose, or could have anticipated, the specific method now scheduled to be used against them, and the state’s retroactive application of House Bill 37 forecloses any argument that the new method’s adoption alone entitles them to relief.
The Public Reaction, and the Confusion It Generated
The weeks surrounding July 1, 2026 produced a genuinely strange information environment, one worth documenting because it illustrates how poorly the public actually understood what its own legislature had done. Claims circulated on Facebook, X, and Threads in June 2026 asserting that Idaho was “officially moving away from lethal injection” altogether, and that the firing squad would become the mandatory method specifically for people convicted of raping a child, conflating House Bill 37 with the companion child-sexual-abuse capital statute chapter three discusses in detail.18 Both claims required fact-checking. Snopes investigated and confirmed the narrower, more accurate version of the story: Idaho had made the firing squad primary, but had not eliminated lethal injection, which remains available as a backup, and the firing squad is not statutorily tied to any specific category of offense, applying instead to whichever sentence a court has already imposed under whichever capital statute governed the conviction.19
The confusion is worth dwelling on, because it reveals something about how thinly the public actually engages with capital punishment policy even at the moment of its most dramatic revision in decades. A change significant enough to make Idaho the first state in American history to default to the bullet generated, in its immediate aftermath, more viral misinformation about its scope than accurate public understanding of its substance. Local coverage, from outlets like Idaho’s CBS2 affiliate, did the more sober work of explaining the actual mechanics, the five-state landscape, the new chamber, the qualification standards this book has already detailed. But that coverage competed, in the information ecosystem most Americans actually inhabit, with viral claims that were simpler, more alarming, and considerably less accurate. This is not a matter of blaming ordinary people for failing to track legislative minutiae. It is a matter of noting that a policy this consequential deserves a public conversation considerably more careful than the one it actually received, and that the gap between what Idaho’s law does and what the public believes it does is itself a kind of failure, adjacent to but distinct from the failures of certainty, humanity, honesty, and choice this book spends its remaining chapters examining in detail.
The Rest of This Book
The rest of this book is an argument that Idaho engineered around the wrong failure. The vein was never the problem. The problem is what happens when a state decides that killing a person is a task to be optimized rather than a thing it should not be doing at all. Idaho spent 1.2 million dollars and fourteen months solving for certainty. Chapters six through nine show, using Idaho’s own five-state cohort as the evidence, that certainty is not what it bought.
Notes
011. Kevin Fixler, "Idaho Will Soon Turn to Firing Squad Executions. Police Will Pull the Triggers," Idaho Statesman (via Associated Press/Tribune Content Agency), June 10, 2026.
022. Fixler, Idaho Statesman, June 10, 2026; "F-block retrofit update," Idaho Department of Correction, June 2, 2025 (project scope, cost, and design details).
033. Death Penalty Information Center, "Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method," March 17, 2025; "F-block retrofit update," Idaho Department of Correction, June 2, 2025.
044. "Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho," CBS2 / IdahoNews.com (KBOI), June 2026; Fixler, Idaho Statesman, June 10, 2026. On IDOC’s parallel exploration of a remote-operated firing mechanism, see chapter eleven and notes accompanying it. During the same period the F-Block retrofit was under way, IDOC spokesperson Blake Lopez told the Idaho Statesman by email that "a remote-operated system is preferred, as it would allow executions by firing squad to be carried out with minimal involvement from our staff," and that the department was "actively exploring available options." Kevin Fixler, "Idaho plans for firing squad executions aim to keep prison staff from rifles," Idaho Statesman, 2025. The protocol IDOC published in June 2026 describes three human shooters and does not incorporate a remote-operated system.
055. Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho,” state-by-state profile (accessed July 2026); “Death penalty in Idaho: Historical timeline,” KTVB, February 28, 2024.
066. Death Penalty Information Center, “Gerald Pizzuto, Jr.” (case page) and “Idaho,” state-by-state profile; “Idaho death penalty execution of Pizzuto canceled as state can’t find lethal injection drugs,” Boise State Public Radio (Associated Press), November 30, 2022.
077. “Idaho stopped Creech execution after it failed 8 attempts to insert IV for lethal injection,” Boise State Public Radio, February 28, 2024 (quoting IDOC Director Josh Tewalt); Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho.”
088. Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” March 17, 2025.
099. Kevin Fixler, “Idaho pauses executions into 2026 as prison system preps for firing squad,” Idaho Statesman (Tribune Content Agency), May 27, 2025; “Idaho stopped Creech execution after it failed 8 attempts to insert IV for lethal injection,” Boise State Public Radio, February 28, 2024 (Director Tewalt on contractor unwillingness to work on execution-related construction).
1010. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 / IdahoNews.com, June 2026; Laerke Christensen, “Idaho will use firing squad as main execution method beginning July 2026,” Snopes.com, June 25, 2026.
1111. Laerke Christensen, “Idaho will use firing squad as main execution method beginning July 2026,” Snopes.com, June 25, 2026.
1212. "Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions," Police1, June 12, 2026 (IDOC spokesperson Ryan Mortensen quoted describing the department as ready to carry out the new procedure after July 1).
1313. Idaho Code § 19-2716, as amended by House Bill 37 (2025). Text as published by the Idaho State Legislature, https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title19/t19ch27/sect19-2716/.
1414. Idaho Code § 19-2716(2)-(4).
1515. Idaho Code § 19-2716(6), providing that the director determines execution procedures and that those procedures are not subject to chapter 52, title 67, Idaho Code, the Idaho Administrative Procedure Act. On House Bill 803, see chapter thirteen.
1616. Compare the text of Idaho Code § 19-2716 published by the Idaho State Legislature with the superseded version still displayed at FindLaw, https://codes.findlaw.com/id/title-19-criminal-procedure/id-st-sect-19-2716/ (accessed July 2026), which reflects the 2023 text enacted by House Bill 186.
1717. House Bill 37, Idaho State Legislature, 2025 regular session (legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2025/legislation/h0037/); Death Penalty Information Center, “2025 Roundup of Death Penalty Related Legislation,” February 4, 2026.
1818. Snopes, June 25, 2026.
1919. Snopes, June 25, 2026; Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho,” state-by-state profile (accessed July 2026).