Labrador Letter: Touring Idaho’s New Firing Squad Chamber

Dear Friends,

Last week I toured the newly completed execution chamber at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution (IMSI) in Kuna. I want to thank IDOC Director Bree Derrick and Division of Prisons Chief Liz Neville for taking the time to walk my team and me through the new facility and answer our questions.

What struck me most was how deliberate and careful every part of the process is. This is not a facility run by people who take this responsibility lightly. It is a solemn legal obligation carried out with precision, restraint, and an understanding of the gravity of what is taking place.

My office defends Idaho’s laws in court, and few parts of that work carry the weight of capital litigation. When death row inmates challenge their sentences on appeal, year after year and decade after decade, it is attorneys in my office—assigned to the Capital Litigation Unit and to represent IDOC—who answer those appeals.

Most people don’t realize how the process unfolds. After a sentence of death is final, the state is required to seek a warrant for the execution of the condemned. The warrant must specify the date of the execution, not more than 30 days from the day the warrant is signed. My office spends nearly every day between the signing of the warrant and the execution in court. The condemend’s attorneys spend those days filing challenges in state and federal court—all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. My office will be responding to every one of them. 

An execution can then move forward on the date set in the warrant unless a court with jurisdiction has entered a stay—meaning a hold or pause on the executuion. Most Idahoans never see that part of the process. They see the outcome, but not the years of litigation followed by the usually intense legal activity during those final thirty days.

Under Idaho regulations, the Attorney General, or a designee, is allowed to be present in the state’s witness area during an execution. I sat in that viewing room in February 2024. Before an execution can proceed, IDOC’s director is required to confer with the Attorney General, or a designee, and the Governor, or a designee, to confirm there is no legal impediment to moving forward.

That is not a responsibility I take lightly. It is one of the reasons I chose to tour the facility now that its renovation is complete. I believe that if the state is going to carry out a sentence of death, it has an obligation to do so carefully, lawfully, and with the utmost respect for the gravity of the act.

I helped author the 2023 bill with Representative Bruce Skaug that brought the firing squad back to Idaho as a backup method of execution. After the unsuccessful 2024 attempt to carry out an execution by lethal injection, the Legislature went further in 2025 and made the firing squad Idaho’s primary method, with lethal injection staying as the backup.

I believe Idaho legislators made that decision because the state has an obligation to have a reliable and humane method of carrying out a lawful sentence. Lethal injection has become increasingly difficult to carry out because of drug availability, supply chain restrictions, physiological challenges and, in some cases, the difficulty of establishing reliable intravenous access. The Legislature decided that the firing squad provides a more reliable method. A society that imposes this punishment owes it to everyone involved, including the condemned, to carry it out without unnecessary suffering.

Idaho currently has eight people on death row, seven men at IMSI and one woman at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center. Nobody who enters the execution chamber gets there quickly. Each person has the opportunity to go through, or is still going through, years of appeals in the courts seeking to stop or overturn the sentence.

It is easy to look at a person, usually decades removed from their crimes, gray and old now, and feel a kind of unease about it all. Time does that. But time does not erase what happened to the victims. They never got those decades with their families and loved ones. Their lives were cut short, and the futures they should have had were taken from them.

These are people a jury convicted of taking the lives of other human beings, often in horrific circumstances. Behind each case are victims and families who have carried the pain of those crimes for years, sometimes for generations. They, too, are part of the story.

The length of the capital appeals process means that families can wait for decades before a sentence is finally carried out. I believe that when a jury has imposed the death penalty, and every appeal has run its course, justice requires that the sentence ultimately be enacted. But I also recognize that the passage of time can make an already difficult process even more painful for victims’ families, who have spent years waiting for finality.

Standing inside the execution chamber last week was a solemn experience. I believe capital punishment can be a just response when guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and every appeal has run its course. But there was nothing to celebrate in that room.

I thought about the victims whose lives were taken. I thought about the families who have waited years, and in some cases most of their lives, for justice to be carried out. And I thought about the responsibility that falls on those of us charged with making sure the law is followed when the state carries out its most serious punishment.

Whatever one’s views on the death penalty, this is a solemn responsibility and must always be treated that way.