On Nov. 27, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general announced her intention to seek a death warrant in the case of Aaron Gunches and to restart executions after a two-year hiatus. “My office has been preparing since earlier this year to resume executions in Arizona,” Kris Mayes said. “Back in May, I indicated that executions would resume by early 2025.”
The attorney general’s plan is a mistake and a politically motivated calculation in a closely divided state where Democrats must be careful not to offend Republican and independent votes. But the fact of the matter remains: Arizona’s death penalty is no more reliable or fair now than it was in 2022.
And what is true in Arizona is true everywhere the death penalty exists in this country.
Before looking more closely at Arizona’s death penalty mistake, we should recall that the state has a long death penalty history, marked by frequent starts and stops dating all the way back to the period before it was admitted to the Union.
In 1910, Arizona began carrying out executions at the newly constructed Florence State Prison. Jose Lopez was the first individual executed by hanging at Florence.
Six years later, the voters passed a ballot measure that abolished the death penalty. Just two years after that, voters reversed course, and executions resumed.
Another chapter in Arizona’s off-again, on-again death penalty history occurred between 1962 and 1992 when no executions were performed. All told, 143 people have been put to death in the state’s history.
Arizona has had its share of botched executions. In 1930, Eva Dugan was decapitated when the state hanged her. In 2014, Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in another botched execution.
Eight years later, Arizona botched the execution of Clarence Dixon. The execution team “failed to set an intravenous line in Dixon’s arms for 25 minutes before performing an unauthorized ‘cutdown’ procedure to use a vein in his groin to insert the IV.”
Beyond these gruesome failures, Arizona also has had difficulty obtaining drugs needed to carry out executions. It even tried to import them from a supplier not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, an act prohibited by federal law.
These problems led Mayes and Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) to stop executions in January 2023, soon after they took office. The governor ordered a review of the death penalty system, which she said “needs better oversight on numerous fronts.”
As NPR reported at the time, that review was intended to “examine, among other things, the state’s procurement process for lethal injection drugs and lethal gas, execution procedures, the access of news organizations to executions and the training of staff to carry out executions.” Hobbs then appointed retired Judge David Duncan as the Death Penalty Independent Review Commissioner and charged him to make recommendations on “improving the transparency, accountability, and safety of the execution process.”
But instead of identifying ways to clean up Arizona’s lethal injection mess, Duncan wrote to the governor saying that recommending that, because the requisite drugs were not reliably available, the state should “start using the firing squad.”
The governor apparently did not like what Duncan had to say and fired him before he could make his report official. Explaining her decision, she claimed that “he had gone far afield of her directive ‘to focus on procurement, protocols, and procedures related to carrying out an execution under existing law.
Mayes, in contrast, is eager to get Arizona back in the execution business. She assured citizens of the Grand Canyon State that “We have worked with ADCRR throughout its process to carefully review and improve the state’s death penalty procedures,” and expressed confidence that “executions can now proceed in compliance with state and federal law.”
Hobbs followed suit. Her spokesman said that she “‘remains committed to upholding the law while ensuring justice is carried out in a way that’s transparent and humane.’” He emphasized that corrections officials “‘conducted a thorough review of policies and procedures and made critical improvements to help ensure executions carried out by the State meet legal and constitutional standards.’”
This the classic “just following the law” excuse, as hollow as it is familiar. Recall that when Vice President Harris was attorney general of California, she used the same excuse to explain why, even though she claimed to be opposed to capital punishment, she was defending existing death sentences in her state.
Hobbs herself exposed this charade last year. In response to a suit brought by the victim’s family seeking an order directing her to proceed with Gunches’s execution, Hobbs pointed out that neither she nor the attorney general is legally obligated in any case to seek a death warrant or proceed with an execution.
The Arizona Supreme Court agreed. It “held that the execution warrant that it issued ‘authorized’ the governor to proceed with the execution of Mr. Gunches. This authorization, however, did not rise to the level of a command.” So the decision to resume executions rests entirely with the governor and the attorney general.
Both are up for re-election in 2026. Both were elected in 2022 by razor-thin margins.
Restarting the death penalty next year is one way for them to walk the “fine line” of running as a Democrat in a Trump-backing border state with a Republican advantage in voter registration.
But they have done very little to address the problems that plague their state’s death penalty system. Laura Conover, an attorney for Arizona’s second-largest county, labels it “a failed system proven to be racially biased, subjective, and dangerous, as our wrongful conviction team knows all too well.”
And, as Judge Duncan explains, lethal injection is nothing like “what happens when … (someone has) to put a beloved pet to sleep. … The medical personnel who are best suited to do this are not allowed to be anywhere near it because the … American Medical Association’s code of ethics says that, ‘a physician must not participate in a legally authorized execution.’”
Duncan rightly notes that “the world of execution … is so secretive that no best practices ever emerge, no mistakes are shared, no lessons are ever learned or shared with other people.” All of this, he argues, “breeds errors and flawed practices that hobble lethal injections.”
That is why it is a serious mistake for Arizona to restart the machinery of death and for other states to cling to capital punishment. It is not too late for Hobbs and Mayes to change course and spare the state they serve from making it. If they do, they can send a message to the country: that no political calculations justify maintaining America’s deeply flawed death penalty system.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.
