Tom Howard, a photographer from the Chicago Tribune, took the first photo of capital punishment carried out by electric chair in 1928, 38 years after the first use case in New York. Howard tied a camera around his ankle with a trigger wire running up his leg. The photo showed a scared woman bound and blindfolded. Through the blur of the long exposure, her fear made the front page.
Even after Howard’s infamous photo, cameras have almost never been allowed into executions, and for many years after, guests were required to lift their pant legs. The execution of Allen Davis, the last person to die by electric chair in Florida in 1999, is one of the few modern photographs available of a person’s final moments at the hands of the government.
The bruised and bloody body does not show just show a dead man, but a victim of torture. How can the government call capital punishment justice when they refuse transparency, and the photos which exist are filled with fear and anguish?
Recently, Bryan Kohberger took a plea deal confessing to the murder of four University of Idaho students to avoid capital punishment. Some of the families of the victims wanted a jury verdict that sentenced Kohberger to death. The families said the state of Idaho “failed” them, but would the state committing first degree murder, the exact crime Kohberger was charged with, have any meaning at all? How can the state have any more authority over who can be permitted to live than the criminals it seeks to punish?
Since 1608, a total of 8,776 people have been killed for their crimes in the United States. Of those, 277, or 3.15%, have been botched, meaning that an unanticipated delay resulted in unnecessary agony for the prisoner, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Davis’ execution was among those botched.
The death penalty is losing global popularity. Only 23 United Nations member countries retain capital punishment, according to Penal Reform International, with it being legal in just half of U.S. states, including Idaho. The U.S. federal death penalty, ruled unconstitutional in 1972 but reinstated in 1988, is applied narrowly, with 16 executions in the modern era, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Currently, three prisoners are on federal death row.
Medical and pharmaceutical companies including Baxter International Inc., B. Braun Medical Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer have stopped production of the chemicals used in lethal injection or refuse their sale to U.S. prisons.
In the past two decades, it has been difficult for many states with inmates on death row to source lethal injection chemicals. Botched executions by lethal injection, such as that of Clayton Lockett, whose death lasted an agonizing 43 minutes, create further push-back against capital punishment.
In March of 2025, Idaho amended a 2023 law to make the firing squad the primary method of execution if lethal injection drugs were not available. The firing squad is the only method with zero botched executions out of 34 total executions. It will cost the state an estimated $1 million to renovate the execution chamber.
In 2022, Thomas Creech, who has been on Idaho’s death row for 50 years, survived a botched execution attempt. The state had spent upwards of $400,000 to procure the lethal injection chemical and build a new execution preparation room for Creech’s ultimately failed execution in 2024 alone.
The death penalty has been found to cost up to six times more than life in prison, according to the Loyola University of Los Angeles Law Review.
The failure of the state to execute Creech after 50 years of incarceration has given him significant mental health issues due to the multiple attempts and unusual level of punishment, according to his attorney, Deborah Czuba. Creech is not an innocent man — he was convicted of five accounts of first-degree murder. However, he has been a financial burden to the state for half a century and has suffered more than most sentenced to life in prison.
The Argonaut not only opposes capital punishment in principle, but the methods and financial burden of death row.
The Editorial Board can be reached at [email protected].