Federal court denies death row appeals

BOISE – A federal judge has rejected several appeals from condemned killer Thomas Eugene Creech, narrowing the tactics Creech can use as he fights in court to get off death row.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill this week rejected Creech’s claims that his defense attorney did a poor job representing him during his previous appeals. Creech, a former church sexton, still has several other appeals pending in the federal courts that must be resolved before his death sentence may be carried out.

Creech has been on Idaho’s death row since 1982, after pleading guilty to killing fellow prison inmate David Dale Jensen by beating him to death with a sock full of batteries. At the time of the murder, Creech was serving a life sentence for murdering two men in Valley County in 1974. He had originally been ordered to die for those killings – spending a year on death row – but the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977 used his appeal to declare Idaho’s earlier death penalty law unconstitutional.

In his most recent appeal in Jensen’s death, Creech claimed that his court-appointed attorney, August Cahill, failed to adequately defend him in a number of ways and that Cahill lacked the experience needed to represent him in such a high-stakes case.

But Winmill said Creech understated Cahill’s experience. The attorney had carried a caseload of between 150 and 220 felonies a year for the past 15 years, Winmill found, and had represented several defendants accused of first-degree murder. Though Cahill had less experience at the appellate level, he had represented at least 25 defendants on appeal, Winmill found.

Creech can still argue on appeal that he suffered from ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing phase of his trial, Winmill ruled. The judge has yet to rule on more than 30 additional issues in the case.