Arizona executions to resume, breaking 2-year pause during review of state procedures

Executions will resume in Arizona following a two-year pause, the state’s top prosecutor says.

In a statement shared with CBS News on Wednesday, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said that she will soon seek an execution warrant for Aaron Brian Gunches, who is on death row after being convicted of killing his girlfriend’s ex-husband.

“My office has been preparing since earlier this year to resume executions in Arizona,” Mayes said. “Back in May, I indicated that executions would resume by early 2025. In accordance with that timeline, I plan to move forward and request an execution warrant from the Arizona Supreme Court in the coming weeks for Aaron Brian Gunches, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Ted Price.”

Mayes said her office had been working with state corrections officials to review and improve death penalty procedures. “I am confident that executions can now proceed in compliance with state and federal law,” Mayes said in her statement. 

Gov. Katie Hobbs had promised not to carry out any executions until there was confidence the state can do so without violating any laws. The attorney general’s office had said it would not seek a court order to carry out the death penalty while a review was underway.

The review Hobbs had ordered effectively ended this month when she dismissed the retired federal magistrate she had appointed earlier to head the review.

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.”

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.

Gunches had been set to be put to death in April 2023. But Hobbs’ office said the state wasn’t prepared to enforce the death penalty because it lacked staff with expertise to carry out executions,. At the time, it also said it could not find an IV team to carry out the lethal injection and didn’t have a contract with a pharmacist to compound the pentobarbital needed for an execution.

Gunches had pleaded guilty to a murder charge in the shooting death of Price, who was his girlfriend’s ex-husband, near the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.

Arizona last carried out three executions in 2022 following a nearly eight-year hiatus brought on by criticism of a 2014 execution and because of difficulties obtaining drugs for execution. In 2014, Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in an execution that his lawyers said was botched. Wood snorted repeatedly and gasped more than 600 times before he died.

The execution of Clarence Dixon, 66, in 2022 ended the nearly eight-year break. Dixon died by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, for his murder conviction in the killing of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin.