Idaho Judge Issues Death Warrant For 1985 Convicted Murderer

BOISE, ID — According to court records, Gerald Pizzuto and some friends walked to a cabin in the mountains north of Boise and robbed, beat and buried two prospectors-Del Herndon, 37 and his aunt, Berta Herndon, 58. Court transcripts state Pizzuto walked out the cabin with a wad of $100 bills, stating he had "put those people to sleep permanently". The group then buried the Herndons next to the cabin.

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On Thursday, the Idaho attorney general's office confirmed the state plans to execute Pizzuto for the crime on June 2. The 65-year old inmate has sat on Idaho's death row since 1986. Accoding to his defense team, Pizzuto now suffers from advanced bladder tumors, Type 2 diabetes, and a variety of heart and lung diseases. He has been prescribed 42 different drugs in the last year and his medical records state he had "begun experiencing memory loss and mild disorientation associated with the death process".

If Pizzuto is put to death, the execution will be Idaho's first since Richard Leavitt was completed in 2012.

Pizzuto's legal team has filed a petition for clemency, calling the execution “an unnecessary exercise, with significant operational and personnel costs for the State.”

“I don’t understand trying to kill somebody who is already dying,” said his sister Angelinna Pizzuto to the Marshall Project, a group working on the case. According to the group, those executed in 2017 had spent an average of 20 years on death row before undergoing the final act. Pizzuto far exceeds the average.

Pizzuto’s lawyers may soon argue that the state’s lethal injection plan will violate his constitutional rights, by failing to account for his medical conditions and causing him excessive pain. The problem with the argument is Idaho officials have yet to disclose what drugs will be used in the execution.

“It’s our contention that they should have to pick it, tell us what it is and we shouldn’t have to guess which of these various protocols they might choose,” said Pizzuto’s lawyer Bruce Livingston. Defense lawyers for Idaho prisoners have been arguing that the delay robs them of the ability to study the medical issues involved, but that in Pizzuto’s case, his heart problems render it “highly likely that he would experience sensations associated with a heart attack, including significant pain and a feeling of impending doom.”

In 2020, the Idaho Department of Correction was ordered by a court to release records of drugs used in an execution. In response, the Idaho department stated drugs are no longer kept on hand.

Pizzuto’s lawyers have argued that he suffers from an intellectual disability, which should disqualify him from execution. They also claimed prosecutors withheld details about his co-defendants, who received deals for pleading guilty and testifying against him.

Pizzuto is also asking the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole to take into consideration his childhood.

According to his siblings, when Pizzuto was a child, his stepfather would frequently wake him up with a flashlight and hunting knife, take him to a garage, string him up with extension cords, rape him and charge other adult men up to $20 to rape him as well. The stepfather beat Pizzuto with a cattle prod, horse crop and 2x4, leaving him with brain damage.

“You could be asleep in your bed and be yanked out by your hair in the middle of the night and drug off,” his sister, Elsie Pizzuto, told a defense investigator.

This all began when Pizzuto was 5 or 6 years old, and his mother, according to the other children, did not protect him from the abuse. If anyone began looking into the abuse, the stepfather would uproot the family, even changing their last names to evade law enforcement.

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