Executions will resume in Arizona after a two-year pause, the state’s attorney general announced.
In a statement shared with CBS News on Wednesday, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said she will soon seek an execution warrant for Aaron Brian Gunches, who is on death row after being convicted guilty of murdering his girlfriend’s ex-husband.
“My office has been preparing since the beginning of the year to resume executions in Arizona,” Mayes said. “Last May, I indicated that executions would resume in early 2025. Consistent with this timeline, I intend to move forward and seek a warrant of execution from the Arizona Supreme Court in the coming weeks against Aaron Brian Gunches, who was sentenced to death. for the murder of Ted Price.”
Mayes said his office has worked with state prison officials to review and improve death penalty procedures. “I am confident that executions can now proceed in accordance with state and federal law,” Mayes said in her statement.
Gov. Katie Hobbs had promised not to carry out any executions until it was certain the state could do so without violating any laws. The attorney general’s office 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 fired the retired federal magistrate she had earlier appointed to lead the review.
The governor’s spokesman, Christian Slater, said Hobbs “remains committed to upholding the law while ensuring justice is served in a transparent and humane manner.”
Corrections officials “conducted a thorough review of policies and procedures and made critical improvements to ensure state executions meet legal and constitutional standards,” Slater said.
Gunches was scheduled to be executed in April 2023. But Hobbs’ office said the state was not ready to carry out the death penalty because it lacked competent personnel to carry out executions. At the time, she also said she was unable to find an IV team to perform the lethal injection and did not have a contract with a pharmacist to prepare 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 Mesa, a Phoenix suburb.
Arizona last carried out three executions in 2022, after a nearly eight-year hiatus brought on by criticism of a 2014 execution and difficulties obtaining execution drugs. 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 sniffed repeatedly and gasped more than 600 times before he died.
The execution of Clarence Dixon, 66, in 2022 ended a nearly eight-year hiatus. 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.
