Photo courtesy Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry
Aaron Gunches was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday morning, the first execution in Arizona since 2022.
Gunches, 53, issued no last words. The execution began at 10:15 a.m. and he was pronounced dead at 10:33 a.m.
Gunches was sentenced to death for the November 2002 murder of Ted Price, the ex-boyfriend of a woman Gunches did drugs with. Price, 40, was staying at the woman’s apartment while waiting to receive student grant money.
The two got into a violent argument, and the woman threw a telephone at him, hitting him in the face and dazing him so badly he couldn’t stand up. Gunches arrived and berated the man, holding a gun to his head. Then, with one of the girlfriend’s roommates driving, he took Price first to the bus station to send him home. When he found he didn’t have enough money to pay for a bus ticket, Gunches had the roommate drive to a remote spot off the Beeline Highway where he shot Price four times.
Price’s body was not found for nearly a month, and Gunches was not apprehended for two months, when he got into a gunfight with a state trooper in La Paz County after a routine traffic stop.
The shootout landed him in prison. He was not charged with the Price murder until 2004.
But through two trials (one sentence was thrown out by the Arizona Supreme Court), Gunches insisted on acting as his own attorney and then refused to offer any defense at all, committing what one judge called “suicide by jury” and being “the architect of his own disaster,” according to one of his former court-appointed attorneys.
Similarly, he scrapped his chances at filing appeals, and in 2018, started petitioning the Arizona Supreme Court and the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to speed up his execution.
He nearly succeeded in 2022, when then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich secured a warrant for execution from the Supreme Court. But Brnovich was already out of office by the scheduled execution date. His successor, Kris Mayes, let the warrant lapse pending a review of the state’s execution protocols, long under scrutiny because of past shortcomings, including a seriously botched 2014 execution that took nearly two hours.
Gov. Katie Hobbs hired retired federal Magistrate Judge David Duncan as an independent commissioner and tasked him with evaluating the state’s lethal injection methods and offering suggestions for improvements. But Duncan’s preliminary findings were damning, and Hobbs and Mayes were under pressure to carry out the Gunches execution because Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell was asking the court to issue a warrant.
Hobbs fired Duncan. Mayes obtained a new death warrant.
But then anti-death penalty advocates took up Duncan’s findings. A Virginia law professor who is an expert on lethal injection filed an amicus brief noting mounting evidence that pentobarbital, the drug used by the state in executions, caused a painful and terrifying death likened to water-boarding torture, even though the outward appearance is that the prisoner just went to sleep. Former FDA officials and pharmacists weighed in, as well, claiming the drug use violated state and federal law and was likely past its expiration date.
The court and the state went forward anyway.
***UPDATE: This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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