Arizona Supreme Court says state can execute Aaron Gunches

Can Arizona legally kill its first death row prisoner in two years? Yes, according to an Arizona Supreme Court ruling released Tuesday afternoon.

In a unanimous decision, the court granted a death warrant for prisoner Aaron Gunches, who was convicted of a 2002 murder. The court’s decision sets up the longtime death row inmate to be killed by lethal injection on March 19.

The execution will be carried out at the central unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence by masked, unidentified executioners through “intravenous injection” of a substance “in a quantity sufficient to cause death,” according to the warrant.

By approving Gunches’ execution, the court sidestepped the thorny question of whether Arizona’s lethal injection processes are humane, an issue the court determined was “not properly before us.” Due to the court’s “limited role at this stage of the proceedings,” the justices could only consider whether the state had met all the required criteria to obtain an execution warrant.

Experts filed amicus briefs arguing that Arizona’s execution methods are inhumane. Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer wrote in the court’s decision that though those experts “critique the method by which the State intends to carry out Gunches’ execution, seeking to litigate in this proceeding whether the State can lawfully carry out an execution by lethal injection at this time,” the court’s decision to grant a death warrant “is not the appropriate forum for any such challenge.”

Timmer noted that Gunches himself had not brought the issue of inhumane executions before the court, nor did he “oppose the issuance of a warrant of execution." Even if Gunches had questioned the state’s execution methods, Timmer wrote, “it would not affect our statutory duty to issue a warrant of execution."

Three justices — James Beene, Bill Montgomery and Vice Chief Justice John Lopez — recused themselves from the case and haven’t participated in any rulings related to Gunches. Two appellate court justices have sat in on the case in their stead.

In 2007, Gunches was convicted of the 2002 murder of Ted Price, his then-girlfriend’s ex-husband. As timing had it, he happened to be next in line when Arizona halted executions after a series of botched lethal injections. Gov. Katie Hobbs recently lifted that pause on executions despite her dismissal of the retired judge she hired to investigate Arizona’s execution practices.

Arizona has had a complicated history with executions. The state has repeatedly failed to execute death row inmates humanely and without screw-ups. After the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014, the state paused executions for eight years. Then, during the final months of Republican Mark Brnovich’s term as state attorney general in 2022, the state resumed executions and killed three more prisoners.

Those executions were a mess. The state’s execution team struggled to insert IVs for lethal injections for all three prisoners. One, Murray Hooper, even turned to the viewing gallery and asked, “Can you believe this?”

When Hobbs and Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes took office in 2023, Hobbs ordered a pause on executions while the state examined what had been going wrong. Hobbs appointed retired federal judge David Duncan to conduct a review of Arizona’s execution practices and said executions wouldn’t resume until that review was complete.

Hobbs reneged on that promise late last year. She fired Duncan before he completed the review, claiming he overstepped his mandate. Duncan suggested that lethal injection was unavoidably inhumane, proposing instead using a firing squad — which is against the law in Arizona — and probing payments to execution staff. In lieu of Duncan’s full report, Hobbs decided an internal review by the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry was sufficient. By the end of 2024, Arizona’s moratorium on capital punishment was over.

The controversy lingers. As Arizona sought a death warrant for Gunches from the Arizona Supreme Court, experts raised questions about the efficacy of the state’s lethal injection drugs and whether the state could execute prisoners without submitting them to excruciating pain.

For his part, Gunches has continuously asked the state to just get it over with. Earlier this year, he petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court to schedule his execution for Friday — Valentine’s Day. The court rejected his request.

Now with the date of Gunches’ execution set for March 19, the state may name the next death row inmate on deck for execution. Currently 111 people are on Arizona’s death row, 25 of whom have exhausted all appeals. The state does not specify the order in which death row inmates are executed.