Photo by David McNew | Getty Images
In the nearly three decades Barry Jones spent on Arizona’s death row, he often contemplated how he would die. A series of failed appeals to prove his innocence had culminated with the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting his most promising bid for freedom in May 2022. Just days before the ruling, the state had executed its first prisoner in almost eight years, raising the prospect of not just death, but a potentially drawn-out and bloody one; media witnesses reported watching executioners spend 25 minutes struggling to find a vein to insert an IV line before cutting into the prisoner’s groin.
The state would have similar problems executing two more prisoners in 2022. Of the seven bungled executions in the country that year, Arizona was responsible for three.
Jones was ultimately freed from prison in 2023 after agreeing to a plea deal. But he still thinks about the people he left behind on death row.
“Everybody on death row thinks about it,” said Jones of problems with executions in the state. “They butcher a man before they kill him.”
Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who narrowly secured the governor’s mansion in November 2022, halted executions in Arizona shortly after taking office in January 2023. Hobbs, who flipped the governor’s seat to Democrats for the first time since 2009, ordered an independent investigation with the goal of “improving the transparency, accountability, and safety of the execution process.” In an executive order, Hobbs noted that “Arizona has a history of executions that have resulted in serious questions about [the state prison system’s] execution protocols and lack of transparency.”
But in November 2024, three weeks after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Hobbs reversed her position, abruptly pulling the plug on the investigation and announcing that the state would resume executions despite the probe uncovering significant flaws with the way the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR) carried out lethal injections. Hobbs instead pointed to an internal ADCRR review that cleared the way for the state to restart executions.
Arizona is now set to execute Aaron Gunches on Wednesday, marking the first execution in the U.S. under a Democratic governor since 2017. (Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe oversaw three executions.)
After decades of seeking death, Aaron Gunches will be executed March 19
Hobbs’ decision to restart Arizona’s death penalty, despite lingering questions about how the state executes people, aligns with a larger trend of other active death penalty states, all of them governed by Republicans, trying to hide the process from public view. As journalists and death penalty lawyers questioned whether poor quality lethal injection drugs or unqualified and untrained staff were leading to long, painful executions, more states turned to secrecy: At least 16 death penalty states, including Arizona, have enacted legislation that allows them to hide the identities of executioners and lethal drug suppliers.
Hobbs also joins other officials in death penalty states who paused executions only to resume them after an internal review gave the all-clear. In 2022, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey ordered an investigation into the state’s execution processes after a string of three prolonged and bloody lethal injections. The probe, which was conducted by prison officials, lasted just over three months and found that there were “no deficiencies.” In Oklahoma, the Department of Public Safety led an inquiry into how it puts prisoners to death following its botched execution of Clayton Lockett. When the state resumed executions four months later, executioners used the wrong drug, and the prisoner, Charles Warner, said he felt like his body “was on fire” before he died.
The absence of publicly available information on the drugs and people involved in capital punishment makes it difficult for watchdogs to exercise oversight over executions.
“There’s not a single state that’s carrying out executions with transparency,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, an independent research program. “One would hope that people in office would have the courage to stand up for fair process and transparency, but that just isn’t always the case.”
In a draft report of his preliminary findings last year, David Duncan, the retired federal magistrate judge appointed by Hobbs to investigate Arizona’s execution practices, detailed “chilling examples of failures that can occur when others are not watching—from corrections officials seeking to learn on the eve of an execution what doses of lethal drugs to administer from Wikipedia, to shipments of state procured lethal drugs delivered to a private home in Phoenix with no apparent or verifiable chain of custody, to the storage of lethal drugs in unmarked jars with no labeling whatsoever.”
Duncan concluded that lethal injection, “while theoretically achievable, is in actual practice, fundamentally unreliable, unworkable and unacceptably prone to errors,” recommending that the state pass legislation to authorize firing-squad executions, which he said did not pose the same challenges. Shortly after the recommendation, Hobbs fired Duncan, telling him that he’d gone beyond the scope of his job.
In calling to restart executions, Hobbs did not address Duncan’s concerns with transparency, but instead relied on an internal review led by ADCRR director Ryan Thornell, who said he made several changes to the execution protocol, including a new medical team with two doctors and a phlebotomist whose identities and qualifications he did not disclose. ADCRR’s review also brushed over issues documented by Duncan, like the unmarked jar of lethal injection drugs, which Thornell said was done to hide the name of the drug’s manufacturer.
Dale Baich, a retired federal public defender who has represented men on death row in Arizona, told Bolts that ADCRR’s review was inadequate. “She did not keep her promise,” Baich said of Hobbs. “There is not the transparency and accountability that she said she was going to bring to the process.”
Hobbs isn’t the first Arizona governor to halt capital punishment after an execution gone awry, only to defer to an internal review conducted by the state prison system.
In 2014, Arizona executed Joseph Wood with an experimental cocktail of midazolam, a sedative, and the opioid hydromorphone. States had turned to new methods after pharmaceutical companies refused to sell their drugs for executions, and it was just the second time the combination had been used to put someone to death. The execution took almost two hours, during which Wood gasped and snorted more than 600 times. By its end, executioners had administered fifteen times the standard dose prescribed in the execution protocol.
Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, ordered ADCRR to temporarily pause executions and investigate what had gone wrong. When the agency released its findings, it concluded that the execution “was handled in accordance with all departmental procedures.” But the death penalty remained paused in Arizona for years after a federal judge issued an injunction putting executions on hold while other death row inmates sued over the state’s new drug combination. The state’s corrections department rewrote its execution protocol to comply with the court by 2017, so that only single doses of sodium thiopental or pentobarbital could be used, but Arizona didn’t resume executions until 2022 because of difficulties acquiring the drugs.
Poorly executed: ‘The experiment failed,’ halting executions in Arizona
As Arizona prepares to execute Gunches, the state still hasn’t answered key questions about its processes, such as where it sourced its drugs. An invoice obtained by The Guardian showed that the state bought a key ingredient to make pentobarbital in 2020 for $1.5 million. Thornell, the prison system director, said in his report to Hobbs that the agency had thrown out compounded pentobarbital that had expired, but provided few details about the status of the raw material used to make the drugs that’s still in ADCRR’s possession. Thornell said the agency spoke with the supplier about the raw material’s “shelf life, expiration dates, and proper testing protocols,” but did not disclose any additional details about when it expires or whether it’s safe to use in executions.
Making it easier for Arizona to resume executions without accounting for its past failings, Gunches waived his appeals and volunteered to be executed, foregoing any legal challenges to the protocol that could have forced the state to disclose that information.
Corrina Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond who studies capital punishment, told Bolts that Arizona is dodging accountability by abandoning the independent review of its execution protocols and executing someone who won’t contest their execution. Earlier this year, Lain urged a court to halt Gunches’ execution over concerns the state’s protocols will result in “tortuous deaths.”
“There are two ways to know whether a state can legally and constitutionally carry out an execution,” she told Bolts. “One is an independent review. The other is litigation. Arizona got rid of both of those.”
Seven states that have resumed executions after a pause of five or more years have restarted the death penalty with a volunteer, according to Dunham. “The machinery of death is hard to get going. But once it gets going, it is easier to continue,” he said. “It is harder to get going when the first execution is subject to meaningful appellate review.”
While Hobbs said that she felt prepared to resume carrying out death sentences because of the changes made as part of ADCRR’s review, advocates have other theories about why the governor chose to start executing prisoners again.
Lain, for instance, charged that Hobbs’ willingness to overlook the problems surfaced by the independent review is a “patently political” appeal to conservatives after her narrow victory in 2022. “It is no coincidence that the state terminated its independent review within days after the election of Donald Trump,” she said.
Hobbs’ reversal also coincided with a lawsuit filed by Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell seeking to win the authority to set execution dates, an authority that’s reserved for the state’s attorney general. Mitchell dropped her lawsuit after Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat who won by just 280 votes in 2022, sought a death warrant for Gunches. If Mitchell’s lawsuit had moved forward, the state risked the possibility of the court, made up entirely of conservative justices, siding with the Republican prosecutor and allowing county attorneys to ask for death warrants—which could trigger even more executions.
Without the political pressure from Mitchell, “It is likely that executions would not have restarted,” Dunham told Bolts.
Hobbs’ office did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment for this story.
Unlike Mitchell in Maricopa County, some Arizona prosecutors are moving away from the death penalty. In left-leaning Pima County, the second largest county in the state, County Attorney Laura Conover has instructed her prosecutors to stop seeking the death penalty over concerns about the way the state executes people. There are 15 people from the county on death row who were prosecuted by previous county attorneys, however.
Conover says that Pima County now illustrates how the death penalty is not necessary to maintain public safety. Murders and violent crime have fallen under her tenure, which aligns with research showing that capital punishment doesn’t deter crime. When dealing with capital crimes, Conover instead seeks life imprisonment without parole, which she told Bolts is itself a “type of death sentence.”
“We take it seriously and we proceed with caution, because we are sentencing a person to prison and for them to die there,” Conover said. “The death penalty is simply not necessary anymore.”
Arizona’s last Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, oversaw one execution in her tenure ending in 2009. But since then, the party has come to a national consensus against the death penalty. In 2016, the Democratic platform included a goal of abolishing the death penalty, and carried the issue on to the 2020 agenda, culminating in former President Joe Biden’s commutation of 37 federal death row sentences in his final days in office.
Plus, many Democratic governors issued moratoriums on the death penalty, including in California and Pennsylvania, or granted clemency to people on death row in their state, which explains the roughly eight-year streak since the last execution under a Democratic governor.
But there was no mention of the death penalty in the 2024 platform. The shift mimics a broader backtracking on criminal justice reforms that became key campaign issues in 2020 following the George Floyd uprisings, but have since diminished as a priority within the Democratic party.
But the death penalty isn’t inherently a partisan issue, said Nicholas Cote, a strategist for the advocacy group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. He told Bolts that many Republicans oppose the death penalty because they believe it conflicts with conservative principles. Even some who believe the state should have the authority to put some people to death still object to the secrecy that surrounds the process and the risk of torturous executions that violate constitutional protections, Cote said.
“This is the ultimate state power. Even if you believe the death penalty is appropriate in certain situations, the people have the right to know the law is being followed,” Cote said. “The governor has reversed course. But everything flagged for concern still holds true.”
In a bid to stop the debate around capital punishment in Arizona altogether, state Representative Patty Contreras, a Democrat, has introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty, which would ultimately require a ballot measure to amend the state’s constitution. Contreras told Bolts she is seeking support from colleagues across party lines who question “whether there is a humane way to do this and why the report was stopped,” and hopes more lawmakers will call on the governor to stop Gunches’ execution.
Across the aisle, Arizona Republicans have advanced a bill to legalize executions by firing squad, a method revived in South Carolina that until this year had only previously been used three times, all in Utah. Sponsors of the proposal, which would also require a public vote of approval to become law, cite Duncan’s recommendation for the state to adopt the method.
There are 112 people on death row in Arizona, and 25 have exhausted or waived their appeals, according to the state, and are eligible for execution. So far, Gunches is the only prisoner who has received a death warrant.
Kat Jutras, executive director of advocacy group Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona, became friends with Gunches through her work. In a virtual town hall hosted by opponents of the death penalty earlier this month, Jutras said that while Gunches has made the decision to be executed with a sound mind, she worries that the governor is “choosing to look the other way as this execution moves forward despite knowing that there are extreme challenges regarding how the lethal injection process has happened here in the last five years under the previous administration.”
“So there’s extreme concerns about what’s going to happen within this execution,” Jutras said.
In the weeks leading up to his execution, Gunches has been working out daily in hopes that being in good shape will help avoid complications with finding a vein, according to Jutras. She told the town hall that she speaks regularly with Gunches, describing him as a close friend who enjoys feeding feral cats in the prison yard. Gunches also launched a program that provides books for Arizona’s death row inmates. She said that Gunches declined her offer to be there for his execution to spare her from witnessing something go wrong.
“He is very aware of what potential complications can happen and how traumatic that can be for [witnesses],” Jutras said. “Despite his decision to volunteer for this, he does have serious hesitancy about the procedure.”