Goodbye to Aaron Gunches

Tomorrow, Arizona will execute Aaron Gunches, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend’s ex-husband in 2002. I’m the law professor that tried to stop it.

I don’t know Aaron Gunches. Never met him, never talked to him, never corresponded with him in any way. My reason for getting involved in the case had nothing to do with Aaron Gunches. It had to do with the inherent legal, ethical, and moral restraints on the state that purports to execute in its citizens’ name—and Arizona’s shameless refusal to abide by them.

I’ve been studying lethal injection for a long time. My forthcoming book—Secrets of the Killing State: the Untold Story of Lethal Injection—was the product of 7 years of deep research into the topic. Over the course of that research, I’ve seen states botch executions and then refuse to conduct any sort of review to figure out what happened. I’ve seen states conduct a review of themselves and say everything was fine. And I’ve seen states say they are conducting an independent review, and then appoint a non-independent administrator to lead it.

What I have not seen—what this country has never seen in its 200-year history—is what Arizona did here. In the wake of not one, but three botched executions in 2022 (which were themselves the state’s first executions since 2014, when Arizona executed a man for an hour and 57 minutes, the longest execution in US history at the time), Arizona wisely put a pause on executions, hiring a retired federal judge to conduct an independent review of its lethal injection procedures. As I wrote in Secrets of the Killing State, “What a difference leadership makes.”

In hindsight, that was a typo. The line should have read “What a difference an election makes”—for in the wake of the 2024 election, Governor Katie Hobbs decided that an independent review of Arizona’s execution procedures was not so important after all. By then, the independent review had already found utterly indefensible lethal injection practices—including, but not limited to, prison personnel looking on Wikipedia on the eve of an execution to determine how much of the drugs to inject.

But the moral, ethical and legal obligations that once weighed upon Governor Hobbs’s conscience suddenly no longer did. Hobbs fired the judge in the midst of his review, making way for the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry to conduct a review of itself and say everything was fine. Then the state came to the Arizona Supreme Court and essentially said, I’ve examined myself and I’m feeling great about all this, now gimme my death warrant—and by the way, I’m starting with a guy who isn’t fighting it so there’s no one on the other side.

That’s when I got involved, and that’s why.

In the wake of a clearly established, horrific record of torturous deaths and law-breaking (for the full tea-spilling, read the book), there are only two ways to know whether a state can lawfully carry out an execution. One is an independent review. The other is litigation—depositions, cross-examination— the process famously called the greatest engine for the discovery of truth. In one swoop, Arizona knocked out both.

Now the state brazenly says we’re ready. Yeah, no. Real readiness would have welcomed an independent review and the stamp of approval (or recommended fixes) that would have come with it. Real readiness would have told Aaron Gunches to sit down, that the state would prove its worthiness to exercise its ultimate power in a court of law with a real adversary challenging it.

So to Arizona, I say: Cowards all. Arizona may get its execution in the short run, but in the long run, it too proves true my central claim—that the state at its most powerful moment is also the state at its worst.

The execution of Aaron Gunches was never just about Aaron Gunches. He’s a bit player in a much larger play.

I say goodbye to Aaron Gunches, the man I fought for (kinda) but never met. Let your death, like so many others, be yet another brick in a mountain of evidence condemning the killing state itself.