Every argument in this book, about certainty, about humanity, about honesty, about choice, is ultimately an argument about what will happen to eight specific human beings, seven of them held at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution and one held roughly two hundred and fifty miles away at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center. They should be named here, plainly, with what is publicly known about the crimes that brought each of them to death row, because a state’s paperwork tends to reduce a person to a case number and an offense category, and I do not want this book to do the same thing while claiming to argue against the state’s dehumanizing machinery.
As I said in the introduction, naming these people and their crimes is not an argument for their innocence, and this chapter takes no position on whether any individual conviction was just. Some of what follows describes acts of real and terrible violence. My argument throughout this book has never depended on the condemned being innocent, or sympathetic, or wrongly convicted. It depends on a narrower claim: that the method Idaho intends to use on these eight people, regardless of what they did to arrive on this list, does not perform as advertised, and that this failure should matter to anyone evaluating the state’s chosen instrument, independent of how anyone feels about the underlying sentences.
The Roster
As of this writing, in July 2026, Idaho’s death row holds eight people.1 Thomas Eugene Creech, whose case chapter two told in detail, is the longest-serving among them, 1981 is the year he killed David Dale Jensen; the death sentence came in 1983. IDOC’s roster lists him as having received a death sentence in January of 1983. Timothy A. Dunlap has been on death row since April 1992, sentenced to death in Idaho for the 1991 murder of bank teller Tonya Crane during a robbery at a Soda Springs bank, and separately sentenced to death in Ohio for the murder of his girlfriend, Belinda Bolanos, ten days earlier. James Hairston has been on death row since November 1996, sentenced at the age of twenty, then the youngest person under sentence of death in Idaho, for the shooting deaths of William and Dalma Fuhriman, an elderly couple killed at their farmhouse near Downey in Bannock County. Gerald Pizzuto Jr. has been on death row since 1986, the longest tenure in the group apart from Creech’s, convicted of the 1985 killings of Berta Herndon and her nephew Delbert Herndon, a fifty-eight-year-old woman and her thirty-seven-year-old nephew who had gone into the Idaho mountains to prospect for gold when Pizzuto came upon them. Jonathan Daniel Renfro has been on death row since 2017, sentenced for shooting and killing Coeur d’Alene Police Sergeant Greg Moore at close range in 2015. Robin Row has been on death row since December 1993, convicted of the arson deaths of her estranged husband Randy and her two children, ten-year-old Joshua and eight-year-old Tabitha, found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in their Boise apartment; she is the only woman currently under sentence of death in Idaho and is held apart from the men, at Pocatello. Chad Daybell is the most recent addition to the row, sentenced in June 2024 for the murders of his first wife, Tammy Daybell, and his current wife Lori Vallow’s two children, seven-year-old J.J. Vallow and sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan, a case that drew sustained national media attention because of the couple’s doomsday religious beliefs. The eighth prisoner, Azad Abdullah, has been on death row since 2004, convicted in Ada County of murdering his wife, Angie Abdullah, in their Boise home in 2002 and then setting the house on fire while children slept inside, in what prosecutors said was an effort to conceal the killing.2 A ninth man, Erick Hall, was on death row as recently as early 2026 but died in custody in February of that year, before any execution could be carried out, a detail this chapter will return to.3
I list these cases together, briefly and factually, because I think the list itself makes an argument the rest of this chapter will develop: these are not eight interchangeable abstractions. They are a woman convicted of killing her own children, a police officer’s killer, a man who has been dying slowly of cancer in a hospice unit inside a maximum security prison for years, a public figure whose trial was covered by television crews from across the country, and a man old enough to be several of the others’ grandfather, sentenced under laws and social conditions that existed before some of his own prosecutors were born. Whatever a state’s execution protocol is, it will eventually be applied to this exact and particular set of human beings, not to a hypothetical “worst of the worst” that legislative floor debates like to invoke.
The Weight of Decades
The figure that should stop any reader here is time. Pizzuto has been on death row for forty years. Dunlap and Row have each been there for more than three decades. Creech has been there, across two separate death sentences, imprisoned since 1974, continuously under this death sentence since 1983. These are not statistical anomalies particular to Idaho; more than half of all prisoners currently under sentence of death nationwide have been there for more than eighteen years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s own tracking.4 But Idaho’s specific numbers sit at the extreme end even of that already-extreme national pattern, and the reason is not, primarily, that these particular cases involved unusually complex legal questions. It is that Idaho, like many states, has spent decades unable to reliably carry out the sentences its courts and juries handed down, first because of drug shortages, then because of a botched execution, then because of the year and a half spent building a new chamber. The condemned did not create that institutional dysfunction. They have simply lived inside it, for decades, waiting.
What this does to the moral character of a death sentence is not a minor procedural footnote. A jury that sentences a twenty-year-old man to death, as happened with James Hairston in 1996, is sentencing that specific person, at that specific moment in his life, based on a specific judgment about who he was and what he had done. It is not sentencing the man approaching fifty he will have become by the time, if ever, the state actually carries out that sentence. Decades of appeals, stays, and institutional failure do not merely delay an outcome. They apply a form of punishment, prolonged uncertainty about the date and manner of one’s own death, stretched across a majority of a person’s adult life, that no jury voted for and no statute explicitly authorizes. This is punishment by attrition, and it falls with particular weight on people like Pizzuto and Creech, whose bodies have continued aging and, in Pizzuto’s case, failing, inside the very system built to end their lives on a schedule it has never managed to keep.
Against the “Worst of the Worst” Framing
Legislative floor debates over capital punishment, Idaho’s included, lean heavily on a specific rhetorical shorthand: that the death penalty, whatever its imperfections, is reserved for the “worst of the worst,” a small number of uniquely irredeemable offenders whose crimes place them beyond the reach of any lesser punishment. That framing deserves a pause, because the roster just presented does not obviously support it.
Some of the crimes described in this chapter are, by any reasonable measure, at the extreme end of human cruelty: Row’s killing of her own young children, the burning of Officer Myers’s body in South Carolina, Mahdi’s killing spree across two states. Others sit less comfortably inside a “worst of the worst” framing once examined closely, though not always as neatly as an abolitionist might wish. Timothy Dunlap’s crime carried genuinely aggravating features — he killed Tonya Crane with a close-range shotgun blast during a bank robbery, and he had killed a second victim, his girlfriend, in Ohio ten days earlier — and a prosecutor could fairly call it a paradigmatic capital case. Yet it is not obviously more severe, on its face, than a great many armed robberies and murders that do not result in a death sentence, in Idaho or elsewhere; what distinguished Dunlap’s case procedurally was less the crime’s uniqueness than the specific charging and sentencing decisions made by prosecutors and juries in Caribou County and in Ohio. This is not a claim that Dunlap’s sentence was unjust. It is an observation that “worst of the worst” is doing more rhetorical work in the legislative debate this book has documented than the actual roster of condemned people can bear, and that a great deal turns, in practice, on prosecutorial discretion, jury composition, and the specific advocacy available to a given defendant, factors that vary enormously and that “worst of the worst” rhetoric tends to obscure rather than illuminate.
The point is not to relitigate any individual sentence. It is that the “worst of the worst” framing does real work in debates like the one that produced House Bill 37. It reassures legislators and the public that the method under discussion will only ever be applied to a small, uniquely deserving population, making the documented risks feel more abstract and more bearable. The actual roster this chapter has presented, a woman who killed her children, a man convicted during a bank robbery decades ago, a man dying of cancer in hospice care, a man whose trial dominated national television, suggests a more complicated reality: whoever ends up in Idaho’s chair will be exactly as varied, and exactly as human, as the eight people named in this chapter, not a uniform class of monsters the legislature can reason about in the abstract.
Gerald Pizzuto and the Argument His Own Body Makes
Pizzuto’s case deserves particular attention in a book about the firing squad, because his litigation history intersects directly with two of this book’s central concerns: the reliability of Idaho’s execution apparatus, and the question of spiritual accompaniment this book’s author has spent his working life practicing. Idaho issued three separate death warrants for Pizzuto over the years, and postponed every one of them, at least once because the state could not acquire the drugs it needed. Since 2019, by the most recent public reporting available, Pizzuto has been receiving hospice care inside the prison system for late-stage bladder cancer — more than six years, over the course of which doctors who initially estimated he had about a year to live have repeatedly been proven wrong.5 That fact raises its own question entirely apart from execution method: what does it mean for a state to continue pursuing an execution against a man its own medical system has assessed as terminally ill and receiving palliative, end-of-life care.
Pizzuto also filed a legal claim, following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Ramirez v. Collier discussed in the previous chapter, seeking the right to have a spiritual advisor present in the execution chamber itself.6 The Idaho Department of Correction voluntarily agreed to accommodate that request in his specific case, without changing its underlying written policy, which still does not guarantee that accommodation as a matter of course. When the department later moved to dismiss the resulting lawsuit as moot, on the theory that Pizzuto had gotten what he asked for, Pizzuto’s attorneys argued the case needed to stay alive precisely because the written policy itself had not changed, meaning the next person in his position might not receive the same voluntary accommodation. A district court disagreed and dismissed the case. As someone who has spent years fighting exactly this kind of battle in exactly this kind of courtroom, I can tell you how familiar that pattern is: a state grants an individual accommodation just generously enough to moot the lawsuit that would have forced it to guarantee that accommodation for everyone else. It is a strategy, not a mercy, and it recurs throughout the history of spiritual advisor litigation in ways this book’s later chapters will address directly. In 2026 the state would deploy that same strategy on a far larger scale, passing a law widely understood as designed to moot a separate Pizzuto challenge to its execution protocol before the Idaho Supreme Court could rule on it — a development chapter thirteen takes up in detail.
Pizzuto’s attorneys have also made a request with a direct bearing on this entire book’s argument: they have asked the federal court to bar Idaho from attempting another execution of Thomas Creech, on the theory that Creech is a material witness whose own case demonstrates the state’s continuing inability to carry out an execution without violating constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.7 In other words, one condemned man’s failed execution has become, in the hands of another condemned man’s lawyers, direct legal evidence about the unreliability of the entire system both men are caught inside. This is precisely the argument this book has made across its first eight chapters, now playing out as active federal litigation, brought not by outside advocates but by the people the system is preparing to kill.
Azad Abdullah, and the Uneven Distribution of Attention
Of the eight people named at this chapter’s opening, Azad Abdullah is the one who has attracted the least public attention over the years, and let’s be precise about what that does and does not mean. It does not mean the record is thin. An Ada County jury convicted Abdullah in November 2004 of first-degree murder, first-degree arson, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, and injury to a child, for the October 2002 killing of his wife, Angie Abdullah, in the family’s Boise home, followed by his setting the house on fire with children inside, prosecutors said the fire was set to conceal the crime.8 The forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy determined that Angie had died before the fire, of asphyxiation. Testimony at trial described a marriage in collapse: Angie had recently consulted a divorce attorney, and Abdullah had tried to sell the family home and its contents in the months before her death. The Idaho Supreme Court affirmed his convictions and death sentence in an almost 200-page opinion in 2015, and his attorneys have since alleged that the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence for sixteen years.9 There is, in short, a substantial public record.
What distinguishes Abdullah’s case is not the absence of documentation but the absence of sustained national attention, and that unevenness is worth naming rather than papering over, because it illustrates something true about how attention distributes itself across a death row population. Cases that attract national television coverage, like Daybell’s, or decades of high-profile litigation and advocacy, like Creech’s and Pizzuto’s, generate an enormous public conversation. Others do not, for reasons that likely have more to do with the specific dynamics of media attention than with any meaningful difference in the severity of the underlying crime or the strength of the case. A reader who finishes this chapter having heard a great deal about the national spectacle surrounding Daybell and comparatively little about Abdullah is experiencing, in miniature, the same unevenness that characterizes public knowledge of capital punishment nationally: some cases become symbols, endlessly discussed, while others proceed through the same machinery largely unremarked upon, known in detail only to the people directly involved and to the courts that reviewed them.
The People Left Behind
I have organized this chapter around the condemned, because that is the population Idaho’s new chamber is built to receive. But I do not want this book to leave the impression that the people harmed by these eight individuals’ crimes are incidental to the argument, and victims’ families do not speak with one voice on what justice, in these cases, actually requires.
In South Carolina, Meredith Barnett, the daughter of Orangeburg Public Safety Captain James Myers, the man Mikal Mahdi killed and burned in a shed on his own property in 2004, spoke publicly ahead of Mahdi’s execution. “It’s difficult to talk about taking someone else’s life,” she said, “but I do feel like that’s justice.”10 That statement should stand on its own terms rather than be argued out of. Barnett lost her father to a documented act of extraordinary cruelty, grew up without him, and has every right to hold the view she holds about what his killer deserved. Nothing in this book’s argument about certainty, humanity, honesty, or choice is meant to tell Meredith Barnett that her grief, or her sense of what justice requires, is illegitimate.
What this book’s argument does insist on is narrower: that whatever one believes justice requires in the abstract, the specific method Idaho has chosen to deliver it does not reliably do what its own advocates promise, and that failure has consequences independent of how sympathetic or unsympathetic the person on the receiving end may be. Jonathan Renfro murdered a police officer, Sergeant Greg Moore, at close range in 2015, leaving behind colleagues and a family whose loss is real and ongoing.11 Robin Row’s case sits in a different register entirely, because the people she is condemned for killing, her own husband and two young children, were also, in a sense, hers to grieve, a fact that makes her case resistant to the tidy victim-and-perpetrator framing that fits more easily around cases like Mahdi’s or Renfro’s. I raise these distinctions not to rank the condemned by the sympathy their victims deserve, which is not a project this book undertakes, but to insist that the reader hold both truths at once: that real people were gravely harmed by what these eight individuals did, and that the state’s chosen method for responding to that harm remains exactly as unreliable, however sympathetic or justified the underlying sentence.
Robin Row, Alone in Pocatello
Robin Row occupies a singular position in this story, and two opposite temptations are worth resisting in describing it: the temptation to treat her case as somehow less serious because she is a woman, and the temptation to treat her isolation, held alone among Idaho’s condemned at a facility two hundred and fifty miles from the men’s row, as incidental rather than structurally significant. Row was convicted of killing her estranged husband and her two young children by arson, a crime whose details are almost unbearable to sit with regardless of one’s position on capital punishment. She has been on death row since 1993, more than three decades, and she is, as of this writing, the only woman under sentence of death in the entire state. It is also of note, she was sentenced by a judge under a scheme later held unconstitutional.
That singularity matters for the argument of this book because it means that whatever protocol Idaho eventually applies to her, should her case ever reach an execution date, will be a protocol designed, tested, and refined almost entirely around the bodies of men. The target placement, the restraint chair, the marksmanship qualification standards, all of it has been built and rehearsed against a body type and physical configuration that may not match hers in the ways that matter for a method whose entire certainty claim rests on millimeter-level target accuracy. I raise this not to suggest Row deserves special leniency her co-defendants on the men’s row do not, but to note a specific and underexamined way the certainty promise may be even less reliable than the South Carolina data already suggests, when applied to the first woman any state’s modern firing squad protocol has ever actually been used on.
James Hairston, Three Decades Later
Hairston’s case puts the weight of decades in its starkest form. He was twenty years old when he was sentenced to death in 1996, at the time the youngest person under sentence of death in Idaho. He is, as of this writing, approaching fifty, having spent essentially his entire adult life, from late adolescence through middle age, on Idaho’s death row. Whatever judgment a jury made about the twenty-year-old man in 1996, that jury did not and could not have rendered any judgment about the person Hairston has become across thirty years of incarceration under sentence of death, a person who has, by simple virtue of the passage of time, spent more years awaiting execution than most Americans spend in any single career.
None of which is an argument that his sentence should be commuted, a question this book has consistently declined to adjudicate. It is an observation about what the sentence has become. A 1996 jury voting to sentence a twenty-year-old to death was not voting, and could not have been voting, to have that sentence carried out against a man nearing fifty, three decades later, in a room built for a method that did not exist in any state’s statute at the time. The gap between what juries authorize and what states eventually do, stretched across enough time, becomes its own kind of transformation, and the legal system has never adequately reckoned with it.
Erick Hall, and the Death Sentence Nobody Carried Out
This chapter closes with the case of Erick Hall, who was on Idaho’s death row as recently as early 2026 and died in state custody in February of that year, before the Department of Correction ever carried out his sentence. Public reporting at the time of his death attributed it to natural causes; the Ada County Coroner later determined he had died of a stroke.12 He died, as a substantial share of American death row prisoners eventually do, of causes unrelated to the sentence a jury once handed down, his case still working through the appeals process the rest of this chapter has described.
Hall’s death matters to this book’s argument in a way that has nothing to do with the firing squad specifically and everything to do with the broader system this book situates the firing squad inside. A meaningful number of the people American states sentence to death never actually reach an execution chamber at all. They die first, of cancer like the one slowly working through Gerald Pizzuto’s body, of heart disease, of stroke, of age, of the ordinary attrition of a human life lived out across decades inside a maximum security prison. Idaho spent more than 1.2 million dollars and fourteen months building a room specifically engineered to kill people quickly and certainly. It is entirely possible, given the pattern this chapter has just documented, that Erick Hall will not be the last person on Idaho’s row to die of something other than the method the state built that room to deliver. The state’s entire certainty argument assumes the bullet is the variable that matters. For a meaningful share of the eight people this chapter has named, the variable that will actually determine how their case ends may simply be time, and the ordinary mortality no legislature can engineer around, no matter how many gun ports it cuts into a wall.
The next chapter turns from the condemned to the people the state has recruited to shoot them: who they are permitted to be, what the state requires of them, and what the act the state is asking them to perform has been documented to do to the people who perform it.
Notes
The Name That Is Not on This List
A reader who has followed Idaho in the news will notice an absence. The most notorious murder case in the state’s modern history is not on this roster, and the reason matters for everything this book argues about cost.13
Bryan Kohberger was charged capitally with the November 2022 killings of four University of Idaho students. The state sought death. In July of 2025 the prosecution agreed to a plea, and Kohberger was sentenced to four consecutive terms of life without parole. He is not on Idaho’s death row.14 In July of 2026 he moved to withdraw the plea, and as this book goes to press that motion is unresolved.15
Set the two facts beside each other. Idaho spent more than 1.2 million dollars retrofitting a room so that it could shoot the eight people named in this chapter. In the same period, the case the entire country was watching — the one prosecutors would most want a death sentence for — resolved without one, by agreement, because a capital trial is expensive and slow and uncertain and the families wanted it over. That is not an argument about whether the plea was right. It is an observation about what the death penalty actually does in practice. It is not reserved for the worst of the worst. It is applied to whoever is still on the row when the machinery is ready.
011. Idaho Department of Correction, “Death Row,” idoc.idaho.gov (eight residents under sentence of death; seven men at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution, one woman at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center); Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho,” deathpenaltyinfo.org.
022. Case details in this paragraph are drawn from primary court records and contemporaneous reporting. Dunlap: State v. Dunlap, 125 Idaho 530 (1993), and Dunlap v. State, Idaho Supreme Court (2022); “Who is on death row in Idaho?” East Idaho News, March 24, 2023. Hairston: “Judge Sentences Man to Death — 20-Year-Old James Hairston Killed Elderly Couple for Money,” Spokesman-Review, November 16, 1996; State v. Hairston, 133 Idaho 496 (1999). Pizzuto: Idaho Office of the Attorney General, “Media Advisory: Attorney General Raúl Labrador Obtains New Death Warrant,” April 11, 2024. Renfro: “Jury convicts Jonathan Renfro of murdering Coeur d’Alene Police Sgt. Greg Moore,” Spokesman-Review, October 13, 2017. Row: State v. Row, 131 Idaho 303 (1998). Daybell: “Chad Daybell: Death sentence for man convicted of triple-murder,” CNN, June 1, 2024. Abdullah: State v. Abdullah, 158 Idaho 386, 348 P.3d 1 (2015); “Man gets death penalty in killing of his wife,” Spokesman-Review, November 24, 2004.
033. Idaho Department of Correction, “IDOC issues notice of death of death row inmate,” February 10, 2026.
044. Death Penalty Information Center data on death row tenure, as cited by KTVB, “‘There has been a real loss of confidence and support’: Experts weigh in on death penalty in Idaho,” April 25, 2024.
055. “Gerald Pizzuto Jr. commutation request denied by Governor Little,” KTVB, December 30, 2021 (Pizzuto placed on hospice care in 2019, with doctors then estimating about a year to live); Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho: New Death Sentence, Updates on Executions, and Lethal Injection Drug Purchase,” March 14, 2025.
066. DPIC, March 14, 2025; Ramirez v. Collier, 595 U.S. 411 (2022).
077. DPIC, March 14, 2025.
088. State v. Abdullah, 158 Idaho 386, 348 P.3d 1 (2015); “Man guilty of murder of his wife,” Spokesman-Review, November 20, 2004; “Man gets death penalty in killing of his wife,” Spokesman-Review, November 24, 2004.
099. State v. Abdullah, 158 Idaho 386 (2015) (affirming convictions and sentence); “Who is on death row in Idaho?” East Idaho News, March 24, 2023 (reporting the 2020 allegation that the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office withheld evidence favorable to Abdullah).
1010. Live 5 News/WCSC, “South Carolina death row inmate executed by firing squad,” April 11–12, 2025 (quoting Meredith Barnett); “Facing the Past: Victim’s daughter reflects as SC execution looms,” Live 5 News, April 11, 2025.
1111. “Jury convicts Jonathan Renfro of murdering Coeur d’Alene Police Sgt. Greg Moore,” Spokesman-Review, October 13, 2017.
1212. Idaho Department of Correction, “IDOC issues notice of death of death row inmate,” February 10, 2026; “Death row inmate Erick Hall died from a stroke, reports coroner,” KTVB, February 21, 2026.
1313. On the Idaho student homicides and the State’s notice of intent to seek the death penalty, see contemporaneous Associated Press and Idaho Statesman coverage, 2023.
1414. “Bryan Kohberger sentenced to four consecutive life terms after plea agreement,” Associated Press, July 23, 2025.
1515. On the July 2026 motion to withdraw the plea, see contemporaneous Associated Press coverage. The motion was pending when this book went to press.