Arizona to Resume Death Row Executions After 2-Year Hiatus

Alabama's lethal injection chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., on Oct. 7, 2002. Dave Martin/AP Photo

Arizona will resume executions of death row inmates following a two-year pause during which officials reviewed the execution process, Attorney General Kris Mayes said on Nov. 27.

In a statement, Mayes said her office has been working with state corrections officials to review and improve the execution process in Arizona since earlier this year.

The attorney general also said her office will seek an execution warrant for death row inmate Aaron Brian Gunches.

Gunches has pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping and was sentenced to death for the 2002 murder of his girlfriend’s ex-husband, Ted Price, near the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.

He was initially set to be put to death in April 2023 but his execution was delayed after Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said the state lacked staff with expertise to administer the lethal injection.

At the time he was scheduled for execution, the state also lacked a contract with a pharmacist to compound pentobarbital, a barbiturate used as a sedative for executions, according to Hobbs.

Hobbs said Arizona would not carry out any executions until she was confident officials would be able to do so without violating any laws. In 2023, she appointed David Duncan, a retired U.S. magistrate judge, to review and “provide transparency” into the state’s execution process.

Hobbs said at the time that Arizona had a “history of mismanaged executions” that have caused serious concerns about execution protocols and lack of transparency.

Following Duncan’s appointment, Mayes’s office said it would not request a court order to carry out the death penalty while the review process was underway but would resume executions by early 2025, once the review was completed.

That review process effectively ended this month when Hobbs dismissed Duncan, according to multiple reports.

In a statement, the governor’s spokesman, Christian Slater, said Hobbs “remains committed to upholding the law while ensuring justice is carried out in a way that’s transparent and humane.”

‘Irreversible, Morally Fraught Punishment’

Corrections officials “conducted a thorough review of policies and procedures and made critical improvements to help ensure executions carried out by the State meet legal and constitutional standards,” Slater said.

Arizona has employed lethal injection as a means of execution since 1993, although the state has paused carrying out death sentences for various periods since then.

Former Gov. Doug Ducey and former state Attorney General Mark Brnovich last carried out executions in Arizona in 2022 following a nearly eight-year hiatus prompted by the 2014 execution of Joseph Wood, who was administered 15 doses of a two-drug mixture over two hours.

Lawyers for Wood said his execution was botched.

The eight-year hiatus was also due, in part, to difficulties in obtaining execution drugs.

A total of three death row inmates, Clarence Dixon, Frank Atwood, and Murray Hooper, were executed by the state in 2022.

In a statement on Wednesday, the group Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona said the resumption of executions in the state “reflects a troubling disregard for the state’s pressing challenges and the needs of victims’ families.”

Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry is “plagued by severe issues, including crumbling infrastructure, staff shortages, unqualified personnel, and systemic failures in healthcare,” the group said. “Rather than addressing these urgent problems, the state has chosen to focus its energy on resuming executions—an irreversible and morally fraught punishment that diverts resources from solutions that could create real, lasting safety and justice.”

The Epoch Times contacted the offices of Gov. Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes for comment but received no response by publication time.

Caden Pearson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.