Idaho’s law took effect on July 1, 2026. This book is being finished in the weeks after. It would be easy, having read this far, to close it believing the state is loaded and waiting. It is not, and the reason is worth setting down plainly, because it is the difference between a book that ends on a date and one that ends on the truth.
Nothing happens in Idaho until someone seeks a death warrant. The attorney general asks. A court issues. Within five days the director of the Department of Correction must certify by affidavit whether the firing squad is available. If she certifies, the shooters are called. If she does not, or if she files nothing, the state reverts to a lethal injection protocol it has not been able to carry out since 2012.1
No warrant has been sought since the statute took effect.2
The two men most often named as the likely first are both beyond the state’s reach at the moment. Thomas Creech has been under a federal stay since November of 2024. Gerald Pizzuto has been under one longer than that. Neither stay concerns the firing squad. Both concern what the state did, or failed to do, with the needle.3 And a separate federal injunction, entered in the media access case three Idaho news organizations brought against the Department of Correction, has restrained Idaho from carrying out executions while that litigation proceeds.4
On July 13, 2026, twelve days after the law took effect, Creech and Pizzuto sued. Their complaint does not argue that being shot is cruel. It argues something narrower and harder to answer: that House Bill 803 stripped the public of any right to see the rules before the state uses them, and that a department writing its own execution procedures without notice, comment or review is not operating under law in any sense the word usually carries.5 That case is pending.
So the room is finished. The rifles are bought and the volunteers are trained and the protocol is signed. Idaho has built the most complete firing squad apparatus in American history and, as of this writing, has no lawful path to use it.
I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean. It is not safety. Stays are lifted. Injunctions are narrowed on appeal. Litigation ends, usually in the state’s favor, usually quietly, usually on a Friday. The eight people named in chapter ten are not safe. They are waiting, which is the condition they have been in for decades and the condition this method was adopted to end.
What the interval offers is not reprieve. It is time. Every fact in this book was available to Idaho’s legislature before it voted and most of it was available before the chamber was built. None of it changed the outcome. It is still available now, to a governor who can commute, to a director who can decline to certify, to a legislature that meets again in January. The affidavit that has not been signed is the smallest and most ordinary thing in this entire apparatus. One person, one document, five days.
Someone will sign it. That is the likeliest end of this story and I have no reason to predict otherwise. But the thing about a switch is that it can be left alone, and the thing about a book is that it can reach the hand before the hand reaches the switch. This one was written to be in that room first.
Notes
011. Idaho Code § 19-2716(2)-(4). On the state’s last completed execution, that of Richard Leavitt in June 2012, see appendix A.
022. As of the completion of this manuscript in late July 2026, no death warrant had been sought under the amended statute. Readers should assume this has changed.
033. On the November 2024 federal stay in Thomas Creech’s case and the litigation posture in Gerald Pizzuto’s, see chapters two and ten and appendix A.
044. On the media access litigation brought by the Idaho Statesman, the Associated Press and East Idaho News, and the resulting injunction restraining executions in Idaho, see chapter twelve and “Idaho plans for firing squad executions aim to keep prison staff from rifles,” Idaho Statesman, 2025.
055. On the July 13, 2026 complaint challenging House Bill 803’s exemption of execution procedures from the Idaho Administrative Procedure Act, see chapter thirteen.