In Our Name
July 20, 2026
This spring, the state finished a renovation at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise. The project took the better part of a year and cost more than $1.2 million. It is a retrofitted unit in F-Block, rebuilt for the firing squad — because on July 1, Idaho became the first state in America to make that method its primary means of execution. Four other states permit it, but only as an option. Idaho alone has made it the default.
Blueprints. Contractors. Change orders. Someone chose the lighting and measured the sight lines. The Department of Correction wrote detailed training requirements and operational guidelines. Nothing about a room like this is accidental; every part of what will happen inside it was decided long before anyone arrives. The Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial was made this way too. Before the first visitor walked its pathways, someone chose which voices to engrave. Someone decided to etch the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in stone. The Memorial and F-Block stand only miles apart, built by the same community. Each is a set of decisions about the value of a human life.
The room in F-Block would be easier to accept if it were built for monsters. But eight human beings sit on Idaho’s death row, all convicted of murder — crimes that stole lives, shattered families, left grief that nothing should soften. Human dignity, though, is not a reward for good behavior. The Universal Declaration defines it as something every person is born with — not earned, and so not something a court can take away. That is the hard part. Dignity for the people we love asks little of us. Dignity for the condemned asks everything. It asks what it means that the newest room our state has built is designed for three rifles and a target placed over a human heart.
The room exists partly because of a February morning in 2024, when Idaho attempted its first execution in nearly twelve years. The prisoner was Thomas Creech, the longest-serving man on the state’s death row. The execution team tried to establish an IV line for lethal injection. They tried eight times. They could not. The state halted the execution and returned Creech to his cell. Lawmakers concluded the method was unreliable. The sponsors of House Bill 37 called the firing squad quick and certain. The bill passed the Senate 28 to 7 and the House 58 to 11, and Governor Little signed it into law.
But certainty is a claim, not a fact. On the floor of the Idaho Senate, one legislator — a veteran and retired police officer — cautioned his colleagues that death by firing squad is sometimes instantaneous and sometimes not. He suggested that anyone who had seen what he had seen would vote differently. Since executions resumed in the United States in 1977, only six have been carried out by firing squad, two of which went badly.
What happens in F-Block will be done in our name. The firing squad will be staffed by our neighbors, funded by our money. This will all be done on behalf of every Idahoan. Whatever one believes about the death penalty itself, the method now belongs to all of us. So does the obligation to witness it honestly, without looking away.
The Universal Declaration, the one etched in stone at the Memorial, was written in 1948 by people who had just seen what happens when a state decides some lives count and some do not. Their answer was to make a strong claim about the dignity of every human life — and they carved out no exceptions. Not for the guilty. Not for anyone. They understood that dignity is not a verdict we render on one another. It is the ground beneath all of us — or it is beneath none of us.
The room in F-Block is ready. The lighting is chosen, the sight lines are measured, the officers are trained. Everything about it is decided except what it says about who we are. That question is still under construction.