Arizona’s death chamber, where Aaron Gunches will be put to death on March 18, 2025. Photo courtesy Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry
The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a warrant of execution for Aaron Gunches, who killed a man in 2002.
Under state law, the warrant sets his execution date out 35 days, which is March 18.
It’s what Gunches has wanted from the beginning.
In 2013, when he stood before the Maricopa County jury that would sentence him to death in 2013, his closing argument was simple and direct.
“Do what you’re going to do,” he told jurors.
“This seems like you’re committing suicide by jury,” responded the judge presiding over his case.
Gunches defended himself. Marci Kratter, the advisory counsel appointed to assist him, was frustrated.
“He did nothing to help himself,” she told the Arizona Mirror. “Absolutely nothing.”
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Gunches never filed a single appeal, and since 2017, he has been asking the Arizona courts to execute him. He almost succeeded in 2022, but the execution was called off when Arizona switched governors. He persisted.
Over the last several months, people he didn’t know filed “friend of the court” briefs to save him from himself — or to save him in order to save other Death Row denizens from a potentially painful death, citing possible problems with the drugs used by the state for lethal injection.
It didn’t matter.
“Appellant Aaron Brian Gunches did not file a response opposing the State’s motion,” the Supreme Court’s order said. “He does not dispute that the requirements of (Arizona law) are satisfied, and he does not oppose issuance of a warrant of execution.”
Gov. Katie Hobbs declined to comment.
Gunches hadn’t planned to kill anyone. In 2002, he went to see his girlfriend in Mesa and found she had been fighting with her ex-husband, Ted Price. Literally: Price was laid out on the floor, dazed, because the girlfriend had hit him the face with her telephone.
They loaded Price into a car with the intention of putting him on a bus out of town. But when they got to the bus station, Gunches realized he didn’t have enough money for bus fare, so they drove up the Beeline Highway instead. At one point, they got out of the car by the roadside, and while Price was not looking, Gunches shot him four times in the back of the head.
He took off in the car, but was pulled over by a Department of Public Safety Officer. They got into a gunfight. Both were wounded. Gunches fled, but he was arrested the next day in the town of Wenden, Arizona.
In 2004, Gunches pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, but since prosecutors wanted a death penalty, he still had to go to trial. Acting as his own attorney, he put up no defense, and was sentenced to death in 2008.
But the Arizona Supreme Court threw out the sentence and sent it back to the trial court. The prosecutor had alleged that the murder was cruel and heinous, but the high court countered that Price never knew what was coming so he had not been in fear of his life, and he had died instantly, meaning he felt no pain. That didn’t fit the legal definition of cruel and heinous.
So, Maricopa County took the case back to trial in 2013, and Gunches decided to defend himself again. Or, rather, he decided not to defend himself again. Kratter was appointed as his advisory counsel.
“Gunches and I would get into fights every day of his trial,” Kratter said.
The prosecution was relentless. Gunches put up no fight. When she would object to statements made by prosecutors, Gunches would shout, “Judge, tell her to sit down and shut up.”
“It should never have been a death trial,” Kratter told the Mirror. She thought it could have been a second-degree murder case, but Gunches had already pleaded guilty, and the only thing the jury had to decide was whether to sentence him to death or life in prison.
There had been no mental competency exam.
“The man is not right in his head,” she said.
But he was determined to face capital punishment. He made no arguments in his own defense. He blocked mitigation, not allowing the jury to hear any argument or justification that he deserved life in prison instead of death. He didn’t want to rot in prison.
Kratter said she felt sorry for the jury and the decision they had to make.
“How can you decide whether someone should live or die when the person puts on no evidence whatsoever?” she said.
They sentenced Gunches to death again.
The second trial passed muster with the Arizona Supreme Court. In a separate proceeding, Gunches had also been convicted of shooting the police officer, and so that crime was considered a “prior bad act” and became an aggravating factor that qualified him for the death penalty.
One appeal to the Supreme Court is mandatory with death sentences. All other appeals are voluntary. Gunches was passed on to that required appeals stage, called post-conviction relief, in which a Superior Court judge can consider new evidence or whether the defendant’s attorney had adequately done her job. But Gunches fired the attorney appointed for that and dropped the appeal. He never filed another.
In 2018, he wrote to then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich, asking to have his sentence carried out. And over the next several years, he wrote four more times before he got an answer.
The state was still dealing with litigation over a badly botched 2014 execution that took nearly two hours. There had been difficulties obtaining suitable drugs for lethal injection. Those problems were resolved by 2020, but Brnovich didn’t request death warrants from the Supreme Court until 2022, when the state executed three men.
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Gunches was fourth on the list, but there was not enough time to carry out the execution before Brnovich left office at the end of the year. And when Katie Hobbs stepped into the Governor’s Office and Kris Mayes became attorney general, they let Gunches’ death warrant expire and declared a moratorium on executions. Hobbs appointed retired federal magistrate judge David Duncan to evaluate the state’s lethal-injection protocol.
Gunches was outraged. In early January, in a hand-written motion, he asked the court to issue another warrant on his behalf because of the state’s pointless “foot-dragging.” He wanted to be executed on Valentine’s Day. The court refused.
And then Maricopa County Attorney General Rachel Mitchell intervened and asked the Supreme Court to bypass Mayes and issue a death warrant. Rather than risk losing a case that could set jurisdiction-bending precedence, Hobbs fired Duncan, and Mayes applied for a new death warrant.
But that wasn’t the end of the legal arguments. A Virginia law professor filed a “friend of the court,” or amicus, brief in which she argued that mounting evidence that the drug used in Arizona executions causes a terrifying and painful death. She likened the feeling to the torture of waterboarding. So did a group of medical professionals, including two former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioners, who warned that the drugs may violate state and federal laws pertaining to branding and storage and expiration and whether pharmacies can prepare drugs that cause death. And there was a third brief filed on behalf of other Death Row prisoners, concerned about the precedent it would set if the state ignored an execution method that may violate Eighth Amendment bans on cruel and unusual punishment.
The state responded to the court that it would proceed nonetheless. Gunches refused to comment at all.
The court has the last word:
“Amici present no arguments germane to the criteria that must guide us in determining whether to issue a warrant of execution. They 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. But this proceeding is not the appropriate forum for any such challenge. The present matter before the Court on the State’s Motion for Warrant of Execution only concerns whether the requirements under (Arizona law) have been satisfied. Because they have been, this Court must issue the warrant of execution that authorizes the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry to carry out Gunches’ execution.”
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