Idaho has executed three people since 1977. It has now spent well over a million dollars building a room to make executing more people easier, faster, and less dependent on a pharmaceutical supply chain the state cannot control. This chapter is about that arithmetic, and about the litigation the state has already generated trying to defend it.
What the Room Actually Cost
The Department of Correction’s own numbers arrived in stages, each one higher than the last. In February 2025, while House Bill 37 was still moving through the legislature, a department spokesperson told the Idaho Capital Sun that designing the rework had already cost $313,915 and that full renovations were initially estimated at $952,589. By the first half of 2025 the department was telling the Idaho Statesman that retrofitting F-Block at Idaho Maximum Security Institution would run just over nine hundred thousand dollars, a figure it described as already about forty-two thousand dollars below a prior estimate. By the time construction finished ahead of the July 1, 2026 effective date, reporting placed the final figure above 1.2 million dollars, a cost overrun consistent with the kind of specialized, security-sensitive construction this project required.1 For comparison, South Carolina retrofitted its own execution chamber to add a firing squad in 2022 for about fifty-four thousand dollars, roughly one twenty-second of what Idaho ultimately spent.2 The overrun is not, by the standards of large capital projects generally, especially remarkable. What is remarkable is what drove part of the delay and expense in the first place: as early as 2019, when Idaho began exploring the firing squad as a contingency method, the department found that contractors capable of doing the necessary construction work were reluctant to take the job.3 Multiple firms, according to the department’s own later statements, declined to bid on work explicitly connected to executions. This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is a data point the state’s own procurement process generated, not an activist’s talking point. Construction professionals, people with no formal position on capital punishment and every incentive to take a paying contract, looked at the specifications, a wall with gun ports, a chair built for restraint, sandbags positioned to catch what a human body does not stop, and a meaningful number of them said no.
The state eventually found contractors willing to do the work, and the project proceeded on a timeline that itself became a matter of public record and, briefly, public controversy. In May 2025, IDOC announced that F-Block would be taken entirely offline for construction, meaning the state would be unable to carry out any execution, by any method, including lethal injection, until the retrofit was complete.4 The department’s own estimate at the time was six to nine months. In practice, the work stretched closer to fourteen months, finishing just ahead of the statutory deadline.
There is an irony in this timeline that Idaho’s legislature did not intend and its own floor debate never mentioned. Every person on Idaho’s death row spent more than a year of 2025 and early 2026 alive, specifically because the state’s own execution chamber was physically incapable of killing anyone during that period. Thomas Creech, seventy-five years old as of this writing, is alive today in part because Idaho chose to spend fourteen months building a more efficient way to kill him rather than attempting to use its existing, already-failed lethal injection apparatus during that window. A room built to make death more certain produced, as an unplanned side effect of its own construction timeline, a year of certain life for the very people it was built to kill. I do not offer this as an argument that Idaho should build execution chambers slowly on purpose, which would be a grotesque thing to actually propose. I offer it because it illustrates, in miniature, how little control any institution actually has over the consequences of the systems it builds, a theme this entire book has traced from Thomas Creech’s veins to Mikal Mahdi’s autopsy to this construction schedule.
The Cheaper Alternative Nobody on the Floor Mentioned
Chapter two recounted prosecutor Jim Harris’s reflection that Idaho’s decades-long pursuit of Thomas Creech’s execution had already cost the state an enormous sum chasing an outcome that might never happen. It is worth putting a broader body of research behind that instinct, because it turns out Harris’s specific observation about Creech is simply a local instance of one of the most consistently replicated findings in all of American criminal justice research: the death penalty costs dramatically more than its only realistic alternative, a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The comparative figures, gathered across dozens of state-level studies over three decades, are strikingly consistent regardless of region or era. A 2021 Ohio Legislative Service Commission review of studies from multiple states found that death penalty cases cost between two and a half and five times more than comparable non-capital cases, with some states requiring between one and three million dollars more per case than an equivalent prosecution seeking life imprisonment.5 A 2013 University of Denver study found Colorado’s capital cases required roughly six times as many days in court as non-capital cases. A California-focused analysis by a federal appellate judge and a law professor calculated that the state had spent roughly four billion dollars on capital punishment since 1978, and that replacing its death sentences with life without parole would save the state on the order of a hundred and seventy million dollars a year.6 Most relevant to this book’s argument, a 2025 review by Indiana’s nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency, compiled as that state’s own legislature considered House Bill 1030 and the death penalty’s cost, found that trying a death penalty case in Indiana costs roughly eight times more than a case seeking life without parole: $290,022 compared to $36,173.7
I raise this here, in a chapter about Idaho’s 1.2 million dollar chamber, because the comparison sharpens exactly what that chamber represents. Idaho did not build F-Block’s retrofit because the firing squad is cheaper than the alternative to a death sentence generally; life imprisonment without parole is reliably, dramatically cheaper than any capital prosecution and any execution method, firing squad included, once the full costs of capital trials, appeals, and specialized incarceration are counted. Idaho built the chamber because the state had already committed, as a matter of settled policy, to seeking death sentences regardless of their cost, and needed a way to make good on death sentences it had already obtained. The 1.2 million dollar question this book has been asking is not whether the firing squad was worth its price relative to life imprisonment; on that question, capital punishment of any kind loses badly and consistently, in study after study, across nearly every state that has examined the question rigorously. The only question Idaho’s legislature actually asked itself was narrower and more expensive still: having already committed to a system dramatically more costly than the alternative, how much additional money should the state spend making sure that system’s own machinery does not embarrass it in public the way Thomas Creech’s veins did in February 2024. The answer, it turned out, was more than 1.2 million dollars, and rising.
Robin Maher made a related observation specifically about Idaho, noting that many people are surprised to learn how early in a case the cost escalation actually begins. “As soon as the prosecutor decides to seek death,” Maher said, “the price tag goes up,” pointing to the long series of appeals and security costs a capital designation triggers regardless of the eventual sentence or method of execution.8 This detail matters for how this chapter’s argument should be understood: the 1.2 million dollar chamber this chapter has documented is not the primary driver of Idaho’s death penalty costs. It is a comparatively small addition to a cost structure that was already, by Maher’s account and the broader research already cited, running far higher than a life-imprisonment alternative would have cost, from the moment prosecutors in each of these eight cases first decided to pursue death rather than accept a plea to a lesser sentence.
The Lawsuit Over What Witnesses Are Allowed to See
Idaho’s transition to the firing squad has already generated litigation independent of any individual death row prisoner’s case, and this litigation deserves attention because it concerns exactly the question chapter eight raised about honesty. The Associated Press, the Idaho Statesman and East Idaho News sued the Department of Correction over witness access to what the protocol calls the Medical Team Room, the concealed space beside the execution chamber where the team prepares and labels the syringes and, under the lethal injection protocol, pushes the drugs through lines fed to the prisoner through holes in the wall. No drugs are administered by the medical team while in the chamber itself. Everything the witnesses are permitted to see happens on one side of that wall, and the act of killing happens on the other. In April 2025 a federal magistrate judge granted a preliminary injunction, barring the state from carrying out lethal injection executions until it improved audio and visual access to that room. The Idaho Attorney General’s Office, representing IDOC, appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit.9
The lawsuit matters beyond its immediate subject. It is not, on its face, a lawsuit about the firing squad specifically; it concerns the preparation room associated with the lethal injection protocol. But it is direct evidence of a familiar pattern: a state execution apparatus resisting outside visibility into its own procedures, forcing journalists and media organizations to go to federal court simply to observe a process the state itself insists is being conducted with dignity and professionalism. If the state resists this level of transparency for the Medical Team Room, there is little reason to expect a more forthcoming posture regarding the firing squad’s shooting team, whose identities House Bill 803 has now placed beyond disclosure entirely. And there is a further wrinkle the timing produces. The injunction reaches the lethal injection protocol, which is the protocol the news organizations sued over and the only one in force when they filed. It is not obvious that it reaches a firing squad execution at all. In June 2026, with the injunction still standing and the Ninth Circuit appeal still pending, the department told reporters it would be prepared to carry out an execution order after July 1. A court order won at real cost, over a room that exists to serve a method Idaho has now demoted, may simply have been routed around. Idaho is not alone in the underlying instinct: the state’s most recent completed execution, the 2012 lethal injection of Richard Leavitt, allowed witnesses to observe the full process for the first time only because a court ordered it in response to a lawsuit brought by news organizations.10
What the Money Could Have Bought
The financial portion of this chapter closes with a comparison Idaho’s own legislative debate never invited but that any taxpayer is entitled to draw. The 1.2 million dollars Idaho spent retrofitting F-Block for the firing squad is not, by the standards of state capital budgets, an enormous sum, but it is also not a trivial one, and it was spent entirely on the capacity to kill people more reliably rather than on any of the alternative uses a rural, comparatively low-population state might have found for the same money: additional public defender staffing to reduce the very appellate delays this book has documented, victim services for families like Meredith Barnett’s, or mental health resources for a prison population that includes prisoners like Gerald Pizzuto receiving hospice care and prisoners like Thomas Creech whose attorneys describe him as carrying documented trauma from his own botched execution.
I do not raise this comparison to suggest that 1.2 million dollars redirected elsewhere would have solved Idaho’s broader capital punishment problems; the cost research cited earlier in this chapter suggests the state’s capital punishment system costs far more than this single line item, and no single redirected expenditure would meaningfully change that larger picture. I raise it because the choice to spend this specific sum on this specific capability, a more reliable killing apparatus, rather than on any of the other pressing needs a state corrections and justice system routinely identifies, is itself a statement of priority that the legislative floor debate, focused entirely on method reliability, never had to answer for directly. Idaho’s legislature was asked, implicitly, to choose between spending more money to kill people more efficiently and spending that same money on almost anything else the state’s justice system might have used it for. It chose the former, by the same lopsided margin that passed every other piece of this book’s legislative history, and it did so without ever framing the choice in those terms on the public record.
The Law Written to Foreclose the Argument
There is a second piece of Idaho litigation history that bears directly on this book’s argument, and it did not play out in a courtroom at all. It played out on the floor of the legislature. In March 2026, less than four months before the firing squad was set to become the state’s primary execution method, the Idaho Legislature passed House Bill 803, which Governor Little signed on March 31 and which took effect, by design, on the same July 1, 2026 date as the firing squad itself.11 The bill does two things, and both of them narrow the public’s ability to see or contest how Idaho kills.
The first is the more consequential. Idaho’s Administrative Procedure Act, like the federal statute it is modeled on and the versions every other state has adopted, requires government agencies to give public notice before adopting new rules, and it allows state courts to strike down agency actions that are arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion. House Bill 803 exempts the Department of Correction’s execution procedures from that review entirely. The practical effect is that the corrections director can now rewrite the state’s execution protocol with no public notice and no judicial oversight, subject only to a constitutional challenge — a prisoner arguing, for instance, that a new protocol amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The state’s own director, Bree Derrick, testified with unusual candor about the point of the exercise: the bill was about “not wanting folks — you know, the public or others — to weigh in on rulemaking related to execution procedures, specifically.”12
The second thing the bill does is extend the state’s execution-secrecy apparatus, already described, to new categories of participant: members of the firing squad, and, in language the statute never defines, “any person or entity that provides technical assistance during the execution process.” Its sponsors called the bill a "technical correction," and on the Senate floor one of them described this half of it as simply making the changes needed to cover those who would carry out a firing squad execution. But the undefined “technical assistance” language reaches considerably wider than the shooters, and the statute leaves its outer boundary to the department’s own discretion. This legislation connects directly to the mooting pattern chapter ten described in Gerald Pizzuto’s case. It is the same strategy, escalated. Pizzuto had a lawsuit pending: a challenge, under the Administrative Procedure Act, to the corrections director’s decision to modify the lethal injection protocol after Thomas Creech’s veins defeated the state in February 2024. He argued the director had changed the protocol arbitrarily, without meeting the public-accountability requirements the Act imposes, and he had appealed the dismissal of that suit to the Idaho Supreme Court, which had ordered briefing. House Bill 803, by exempting execution procedures from that review in the first place, was widely understood by critics, including the ACLU of Idaho, as designed to moot exactly that challenge before the state’s highest court could rule on it. When chapter ten described the state granting one condemned man a spiritual-advisor accommodation just generously enough to moot the lawsuit that would have secured it for everyone else, I called that a strategy rather than a mercy. House Bill 803 is the same strategy written into statute: rather than defend the protocol change on its merits, the state removed the court’s authority to hear the challenge at all. The strategy did not entirely work. On July 13, 2026, twelve days after the firing squad became Idaho’s primary method and House Bill 803 took effect, Pizzuto and Creech sued the Department of Correction over the new execution protocol, calling Director Derrick’s approval of it arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion. That is the Administrative Procedure Act standard, argued by name, against a law written specifically to remove it. They are not challenging the constitutionality of shooting them. They are challenging thirteen provisions of the document that describes how it will be done: the qualifications required to serve on the firing squad, on the medical team and in administration; restrictions on witness access, on attorney access and on recording; the condemned person’s right to engage in spiritual activity; sedation before the execution; the ability of execution volunteers to withdraw; the sourcing, inspection and testing of supplies and equipment; the role of emergency medical services; the director’s certification of the method; and the director’s discretion to amend any of it at will. They ask the court to set the policy aside and return it to the agency.13
Nearly every chapter of this book is somewhere on that list. The marksmanship qualification and the volunteers’ right to walk away are Chapter 11. Witness access and the right to spiritual activity are Chapter 12. The director’s power to rewrite the protocol whenever he likes is the provision this section has just described. Two men the state has spent forty and forty-three years preparing to kill have read the document more closely than the legislature that authorized it, and they have filed the objection the legislature voted to make unavailable. Whether an Idaho court agrees that House Bill 803 forecloses the argument is now the live question, and it will be answered before any of the eight people named in Chapter 10 is brought into that room. Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow, whose warning about Idaho’s optics closes this chapter, opposed the bill on precisely those grounds, questioning why the state would want to limit public and legislative input on something as grave as an execution. She was on the losing side, as opponents of every bill in this book’s legislative history have been. What the law leaves behind is an execution apparatus a court may examine only on constitutional grounds — which is exactly the terrain the next section takes up.
Glossip and the Uphill Battle Ahead
Any legal challenge to Idaho’s firing squad protocol, brought on behalf of Thomas Creech, Gerald Pizzuto, Robin Row, or any of the others named in chapter ten — and, after House Bill 803, a constitutional challenge is very nearly the only kind left — will have to contend with a Supreme Court precedent that makes such challenges considerably harder to win than most people assume. In Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. 863 (2015), the Supreme Court held, in a closely divided 5–4 ruling, that a death row prisoner challenging a specific execution method under the Eighth Amendment must not merely show that the method carries a substantial risk of severe pain.14 He must also identify a known and available alternative method that would significantly reduce that risk and show that the state has refused to adopt it without a legitimate penological reason. Four years later, in Bucklew v. Precythe, the Court extended that requirement to as-applied challenges brought by a single prisoner with a single unusual medical condition, and it added a detail that has shaped everything since: the alternative a prisoner proposes need not already be authorized under the law of the state he is asking to kill him differently.
This is a demanding standard, and it reshapes the entire legal landscape this book’s evidence would otherwise seem to support. It is not enough, under Glossip, for Creech’s attorneys to walk into federal court with Mikal Mahdi’s autopsy report and the pathologist’s estimate of thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering. They would also need to propose a specific, currently available alternative method and demonstrate that Idaho’s refusal to adopt it lacks any legitimate justification. Given that Idaho adopted the firing squad specifically because lethal injection had become logistically unreliable, the state has a ready-made penological justification available for refusing to switch back: the same drug-shortage argument traced in chapter two. This creates a genuinely difficult bind for any prisoner attempting to challenge the method, and it goes a long way toward explaining why the documented failures this book has spent five chapters cataloguing have not, on their own, stopped anything.
There is a bitter symmetry buried in that bind. Under the rule Glossip announced and Bucklew hardened, a condemned person cannot simply prove that a method will hurt him. He has to name a better one. And the method prisoners have named, over and over, in brief after brief across two decades, is the firing squad. The doctrine that makes Idaho’s chamber nearly impossible to challenge is the same doctrine that helped put the gun back in American law. Chapter 14 takes up what happened when a federal court finally agreed.
I raise Glossip not to suggest that litigation is futile, but to be honest about the legal terrain, because I think readers of this book deserve a clear-eyed account of why documented, autopsied failure has not, so far, been sufficient on its own to stop this method’s spread. The courts have built a standard that asks condemned people to solve the state’s logistics problem for it, proposing a workable alternative from inside a legal system that has already shown, across the entirety of Part One of this book, that it cannot reliably supply lethal injection drugs, cannot avoid botching an execution when it tries anyway, and cannot keep a firing squad’s target reliably centered on a heart when it turns to the gun instead. The burden Glossip places on prisoners is not a neutral evidentiary standard. It is a thumb on the scale, and Idaho’s legislature knew, when it voted in February and March of 2025, that this thumb would make its new method considerably harder to challenge in court than the documented evidence alone might otherwise suggest.
What Ninth Circuit Review Could Still Change
The Ninth Circuit appeal of the witness-access injunction discussed earlier in this chapter remained pending as of this writing, and its eventual outcome could meaningfully affect how much of this book’s own evidentiary approach, built substantially on witness accounts and autopsy documentation from South Carolina, is even possible to replicate for Idaho’s own future executions. If the Ninth Circuit affirms, and if the principle it affirms is read to reach the new method rather than only the old one, Idaho’s firing squad executions may generate a more complete public record than South Carolina’s shield laws have allowed for Sigmon’s, Mahdi’s or Bryant’s. If the Ninth Circuit reverses, Idaho’s executions could proceed with even less outside visibility than this book has been able to document for South Carolina.
I raise this pending litigation not to predict its outcome, which I cannot do, but to underscore how much of this book’s own methodology, and any future book like it, depends on the outcome of exactly this kind of institutional transparency litigation. Every fact in this book’s middle chapters came from somewhere: an autopsy report defense attorneys fought to obtain, a witness account a journalist insisted on publishing, a pathologist’s assessment commissioned specifically because the state’s own documentation was deemed insufficient. None of that record exists by the state’s voluntary choice. It exists because people outside the state’s own institutions pushed for it, case by case, lawsuit by lawsuit. Whether Idaho’s own executions, if and when they occur, generate a comparable record will depend substantially on whether that same kind of outside pressure, from media organizations, from defense attorneys, from advocates like this book’s author, continues to be applied with the same persistence South Carolina’s advocates and journalists have shown.
Who Benefits From the Optics
This chapter closes on a question about political economy that the floor debate in chapter three touched only glancingly. Senator Wintrow warned that House Bill 37 would put “the optics of Idaho in a place” she did not think the state wanted to be. I think it is worth asking directly who, within Idaho’s political ecosystem, actually benefits from those optics, because the answer is not simply “the public,” in some abstract sense of collective preference.
Legislators who sponsored and championed House Bill 37 gained a specific, marketable political identity from the bill’s passage: tough on crime, willing to solve a logistical problem the state’s own corrections department had publicly struggled with for years, unafraid of the national media attention the “first state to make the firing squad primary” headline was always going to generate. That attention arrived, largely as predicted, in outlets ranging from CBS News to the Guardian to Snopes, the latter forced to run down public confusion and misinformation about the law’s actual scope. Whether this attention translates into electoral benefit for the bill’s sponsors is a question this book cannot fully answer, but it is not an unreasonable inference that a piece of legislation passed by a 58 to 11 and 28 to 7 margin, in a state where Republican primaries are frequently the more electorally decisive contest, served at least some sponsors’ interest in demonstrating uncompromising support for capital punishment to a primary electorate that rewards exactly that kind of demonstration.15
None of this is a claim about any individual legislator’s motives, which I cannot see into and do not claim to know. It is a claim about incentive structures, and about who bears the cost when those incentives point toward reliability of killing rather than toward the documented human cost this book has spent eleven chapters cataloguing. The people who benefit from Idaho’s new optics are, disproportionately, people who will never sit in the chair, never fire the rifle, and never stand in the witness room. The people who bear the cost are named in chapter ten; the officers who will be asked to shoot them, in chapter eleven. This asymmetry, between who decides and who pays, is not unique to capital punishment, but it is nowhere more starkly visible than in a room built, at public expense, specifically to make that asymmetry more efficient.
Part Four of this book widens the lens beyond Idaho’s borders. The next chapter turns to the federal government, which in April 2026 formally authorized the firing squad as a method of federal execution for the first time in American history, and to the court ruling that has made the method considerably harder for any state to avoid.
Notes
011. “Idaho starts remodel for the firing squad chamber. Here’s what it’ll cost,” Idaho Statesman/Idaho Capital Sun, May 2025 (project estimated at roughly $911,000, about $42,000 below a prior estimate); Kyle Pfannenstiel, "Idaho House widely passes bill to make firing squad main execution method," Idaho Capital Sun, February 6, 2025 (IDOC spokesperson Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic reporting $313,915 in design costs and an initial full-renovation estimate of $952,589, and stating the agency did not plan to seek additional legislative appropriations); "Idaho starts remodel for the firing squad chamber. Here’s what it’ll cost," Idaho Statesman/Idaho Capital Sun, May 2025 (project estimated at roughly $911,000, about $42,000 below a prior estimate); "Idaho will use firing squad as main execution method beginning July 2026," Snopes, June 25, 2026 (Idaho Statesman reporting that the retrofit cost more than $1.2 million).
022. “Idaho starts remodel for the firing squad chamber,” Idaho Statesman, May 2025 (reporting, per the Associated Press, that South Carolina upgraded its execution chamber to add a firing squad in 2022 at a cost of about $54,000).
033. “Idaho pauses executions into 2026 as prison system preps for firing squad,” Corrections1 (Idaho Statesman/Tribune Content Agency), May 27, 2025.
044. Corrections1, May 27, 2025 (quoting IDOC’s May 23, 2025 announcement that F-Block would be taken offline for construction).
055. Death Penalty Information Center, “What to Know: Costs and the Death Penalty,” citing a 2021 Ohio Legislative Service Commission report.
066. Arthur L. Alarcón and Paula M. Mitchell, “Costs of Capital Punishment in California: Will Voters Choose Reform This November?,” 46 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. S1 (2012); USC Gould School of Law, “The High Cost of a Death Sentence”; Death Penalty Information Center, “State Studies on Monetary Costs.”
077. Death Penalty Information Center, “What to Know: Costs and the Death Penalty,” citing the 2025 Indiana Legislative Services Agency fiscal review compiled in response to House Bill 1030 ($290,022 versus $36,173).
088. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” IdahoNews.com, June 2026 (quoting Robin Maher, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center).
099. Corrections1, May 27, 2025.
1010. “Convicted murderer executed in Idaho,” Spokesman-Review, June 13, 2012 (witnesses observed the entire lethal-injection process for the first time following a court order issued in response to a lawsuit by news organizations), Associated Press v. Tewalt, No. 1:24-cv-00587-DKG (D. Idaho), Memorandum Decision and Order, April 29, 2025 (Grasham, M.J.) (granting preliminary injunction as to witness access to the Medical Team Room; noting that no lethal injection drugs are administered by the medical team while in the execution chamber); "Idaho pauses executions into 2026 as prison system preps for firing squad," Corrections1 (Idaho Statesman/Tribune Content Agency), May 27, 2025 (reporting the Attorney General’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit); "Part of Idaho executions is hidden from view. News media sue prison system to change that," Lewiston Tribune, December 2024.
1111. House Bill 803, Idaho Legislature (2026), legislature.idaho.gov; Leah Roemer, “New Idaho Law Shields Execution Procedures from Judicial Review and Public Scrutiny,” Death Penalty Information Center, April 8, 2026; Kevin Fixler, “Judges could no longer review Idaho prison execution decisions under passed bill,” Idaho Statesman, March 30, 2026. The measure stalled earlier in the session as House Bill 525 before being reintroduced in March 2026, and was signed by Gov. Little on March 31, 2026, effective July 1, 2026.
1212. The exemption of execution procedures from Administrative Procedure Act review, and IDOC Director Bree Derrick’s testimony, are described in Roemer, DPIC, April 8, 2026; see also Minutes, Idaho Senate Judiciary & Rules Committee, March 23, 2026.
1313. "Inmates challenge firing squad policy, citing 13 disputed procedures," KIFI Local News 8, July 13, 2026; "‘Abuse of discretion’: Death row prisoners sue over Idaho’s new firing squad," Idaho Statesman/East Idaho News, July 2026; ACLU of Idaho, “2026 — HB 803 — Removing Court Review of Idaho Execution Procedures”; Roemer, DPIC, April 8, 2026 (reporting that critics viewed the bill as designed to moot Pizzuto’s pending Administrative Procedure Act challenge to the post-Creech protocol change). The secrecy amendment expands Idaho Code § 19-2716A.
1414. Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. 863 (2015); Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U.S. 119 (2019). The known-and-available-alternative requirement originates in the plurality opinion in Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 35 (2008).
1515. Vote margins: “Idaho will be only state with firing squad as main execution method, after governor signs bill,” Idaho Capital Sun, March 12, 2025 (House 58–11; Senate 28–7); Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” March 17, 2025.