March 20 (UPI) — Arizona has executed a 53-year-old man convicted of kidnapping and murdering his girlfriend’s former partner in 2002, marking the first death by the state since 2022.
Death row inmate Aaron Gunches was executed by lethal injection at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Florence on Wednesday morning.
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The execution was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. MST. He was declared dead at 10:33 a.m., according to the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.
“The process went according to plan and without incident,” the department said in a statement.
Gunches pleaded guilty in 2007 to first-degree murder and kidnapping and was sentenced to death for fatally shooting Ted Prince four times — three times in the chest and once to the back of the head — in an isolated area of the Arizona desert near Mesa, a city located east of Phoenix, in November 2002.
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Wearing a white jumpsuit, Gunches was escorted into the small execution chamber at 10:01 a.m. and strapped to a gurney. The drug protocol began at …
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