Photo courtesy Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry
At 10:33 a.m. on Wednesday, March 19, Aaron Gunches died by lethal injection as punishment for the murder of Ted Price in 2002.
Gunches’ execution was attended by five media witnesses, members of Ted Price’s family and legal advisors for both Gunches and Price’s family.
Gunches was transferred to the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence on Tuesday night after his last meal, which consisted of a double western burger, spicy gyros, onion rings and baklava.
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On Wednesday morning at 10:02, Gunches was brought into the execution chamber and laid down on the table by five corrections staff members.
Four members of a medical team, their identities shielded by masks and white hoodies, inserted IVs in both of his arms. At 10:14, he was asked if he had any last words. Gunches only shook his head. An executioner in another room injected pentobarbital into lines that led to the IVs.
Gunches barely moved and squeezed his eyes shut. He exhaled hard seven or eight times and then remained motionless.
His heart stopped and he was pronounced dead at 10:33.
Media witnesses and members of Ted Price’s family, in addition to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes discussed the execution at a briefing.
“The family of Ted Price has been waiting for justice for more than two decades,” Mayes said. “They deserve closure.”
The execution was “the final chapter in a process that has spanned nearly 23 years,” Ted Price’s sister, Karen, said.
“Although we’ve taken the final step in the legal process, the pain of losing Ted remains profound and cannot be conveyed into words,” she said.
Gunches was sentenced to death for the November 2002 murder of 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.
Retired federal public defender Dale Baich, one of Gunches’ legal observers at the execution, said that although his death appeared to happen without suffering, scientific studies have found that “rapid administration of a high dose of pentobarbital is excruciatingly painful.”
“Pulmonary edema develops in seconds as the lungs fill with water and one is not able to breathe. There is a sensation of drowning from within and not being able to do anything about it. It is like being waterboarded to death,” he said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror. “The eight deep breaths and chest heaving, the gurgling sounds, and Mr. Gunches trying to catch his breath, are all signs of pulmonary edema. Even though it may have looked peaceful, it was not.”
***UPDATE: This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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