Mega Edition: The State Of Idaho And It's History With The Death Penalty (8/29/26)

Beyond The Horizon · Aug 29, 2026 · 37m · transcript

Idaho’s death penalty had a long history stretching back to the territorial era, with capital punishment established there in 1864, decades before statehood. Executions were originally carried out at the county level and were sometimes public, before the state centralized them at the penitentiary in 1901; Idaho’s final hanging took place in 1957. Like the rest of the country, Idaho’s capital punishment system was disrupted after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, but lawmakers reinstated the death penalty under a revised statute the following year. In the modern era…