Witnesses reported that Gunches shook his head no when asked if he had any last words.
The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry said the lethal injection of Gunches went smoothly and finished at 10:19 a.m. ADCRR estimated his time of death as 10:33, though media witness Troy Hayden of 12 News said Gunches appeared dead before that. By 10:18, media witnesses no longer saw movement in Gunches’ chest, and his face lost its color.
In 2004 Gunches pleaded guilty to kidnapping and first-degree murder in the 2002 killing of Ted Price, the former long-term partner of Gunches’ then-girlfriend, Katherine Lecher. After driving Price into the desert, Gunches shot Price three times in the chest and once in the back of the head, later dumping his body on the Salt River Reservation. Gunches was sentenced to death in 2008 and then again in 2013 after the Arizona Supreme Court found an error in the first sentencing proceeding.
Nearly 23 years after the murder of Ted Price, Gunches walked to Arizona’s death chamber. Five employees escorted Gunches, who was wearing a cotton white jumpsuit and white socks, into the chamber. He did not look at the observation room where witnesses gathered — among them, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell and Price’s younger sister, Karen Price.
Gunches put up no fight as he was strapped to the table and as a white blanket was placed over his body. Four staffers, clad in white, inserted IVs into both his inner elbows. The IV went easily into his right arm. Media witnesses weren’t so sure about the left arm. More than one staffer appeared to work to get the IV in.
Eight syringes were in the room. The team used four — a mix of green and black. Gunches had no visible reaction to the first black syringe. He reacted when the second syringe — a green one — was pushed. Media witnesses said Gunches’ hands were taken by tremors. He began breathing heavily, with a sound like a snore. He exhaled from his mouth with light wheezing and puffing sounds.
Corinna Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond and lethal injection expert who wrote an amicus brief in Gunches’ case, said that these symptoms are of acute pulmonary edema, which means that Gunches was “essentially waterboarded to death.”
“Any execution that took just under 20 minutes and has witnesses saying that he gasped for breath and snored did not go fine,” Lain told New Times after the execution. “I can assure you of that.”
The execution took 17 minutes yet “felt like an eternity,” Arizona Mirror reporter and media witness Michael Kiefer said. He described the execution as the smoothest of the six he has seen — “very uneventful.”
A little more than 30 minutes after entering the chamber, Gunches was dead.
Afterward, Karen Price spoke to the media. Through tears, she expressed “relief that it was over.” When asked if she feels that she has justice, Price responded simply, “Yes, I do.”
“I don’t think we ever thought this day would come,” she said. “So it feels surreal.”
Aaron Gunches faces the death penalty for the 2002 murder of Ted Price.
Arizona Department of Corrections
Experts doubt it was painless
Gunches’ execution was the subject of controversy leading up to his death. Arizona has a troubled history with executions. The botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014 led to an eight-year pause on executions, which resumed in 2022 under Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. That year, Arizona executed three people, none of them without complications.Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs paused executions when she took office in 2023, tasking retired federal judge David Duncan with reviewing the state’s protocols. Late last year, Hobbs dismissed Duncan, who she said had exceeded his mandate. The governor then accepted the results of an internal review done by ADCRR, which concluded that executions could not proceed without issues.
A draft of Duncan’s review said differently. In it, Duncan identified issues with the storage of lethal injection drugs and the competency and payment of execution staff. He also suggested that while humane executions were theoretically possible, they appeared impossible in practice.
After Duncan’s dismissal, the state pushed forward with Gunches’ execution. On Feb. 11, the Arizona Supreme Court issued a death warrant, setting his execution for March 19. The court largely sidestepped questions about whether Arizona’s execution protocols were humane.
Lain believes the execution of Gunches, mixed with the state’s firing of Duncan after botched executions, will set up a “textbook Eighth Amendment claim” for future death-row inmates who face execution in Arizona. They may claim that Arizona didn’t take the necessary steps to ensure that its lethal injection system isn’t cruel and unusual punishment, she argued.
“Arizona went for it anyway and went forward with someone” — Gunches — “who did not test the system or challenge it,” she said. “Aaron Gunches didn’t fight this claim. But the next guy will.”
While ADCRR reported no issues with Gunches’ execution, experts doubt that his death was painless. Observers can’t really know what an executed person feels in their last moments, said Nicholas Cote, an Arizona strategist for the anti-capital punishment group Conservatives Concerned. Cote said Gunches likely experienced “extreme pain and suffering.”
“Even lethal injection executions that do not appear to be visibly botched are still likely to be incredibly painful, if not torturous,” Cote told New Times. “Whether that is apparent to witnesses or not.”
Duncan agreed. Once injected, pentobarbital causes acute pulmonary edema, which Lain believes Gunches experienced. This will cause “the capillaries in the lungs burst, so the lungs fill with water,” Duncan told New Times before Gunches’ execution. A person’s lungs will then “weigh four times more than they should” as they die, so they feel as if they’re “drowning.”
“Even if it looks like it went well, we do not know what went on in the final moments of this man’s life, whether it was humane or not,” Duncan said.
The mechanisms of his final moments won’t be known until Gunches’ autopsy. “I don’t know that we know more today than we did yesterday,” Duncan told Phoenix New Times after Gunches’ execution. “We just don’t know what the person was experiencing.”
Gunches did not challenge his own death order. Instead, “He requested it,” said Ryan McPhie, a criminal defense attorney at Grand Canyon Law Group. (McPhie was not involved in Gunches’ case.) Unlike past death row cases in Arizona, Gunches has mounted no efforts to avoid execution through stays or court battles, McPhie said.
Gunches represented himself throughout his death penalty trial, and Duncan worried his lack of a legal team might have led to errors slipping through as “court proceedings have illuminated what is a very closed and non-transparent world.” David Lish, also a criminal defense attorney at Grand Canyon Law Group, called Gunches’ actions “unusual” and said his execution “could be a bit of an outlier, simply because it’s coming at his urging and his request.”
That outlier nature may mean Gunches’ death does not signal a new era of state executions in Arizona. Arizona has 111 death row inmates awaiting execution, including dozens who have exhausted all appeals. But Lish wouldn’t be surprised if Hobbs and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes — both Democrats — don’t push for another person to go to the death chamber.
“Are we going to start seeing a pattern of more executions? Probably not under Gov. Hobbs and Attorney General Mayes,” Lish said, noting that executions don’t occur as often under Democrat administrations. “I don’t believe that they’re the type of folks that are going to be pushing for executions.”
Mayes did briefly speak to the media after the execution.
“The death penalty is the law of the land in Arizona,” she said. “Today, Arizona resumed the death penalty.”
