Arizona Fires Head of Lethal Injection Review for Reviewing Lethal Injection

When Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs first took office in 2023, the state’s capital punishment system was in crisis. The year before saw the state end its eight-year pause following the disastrous 2014 execution of Joseph Wood; it immediately botched that of Clarence Dixon, forced to suffer a painful and invasive cutdown procedure after the execution team couldn’t find a suitable vein. With another execution on the heels of her inauguration, Hobbs instead decided to pause executions again, ordering a review of multiple aspects of the state’s execution protocol.

Said Hobbs at the time, “Arizona has a history of mismanaged executions that have resulted in serious concerns about ADCRR’s1 execution protocols and lack of transparency. That changes now under my administration…a comprehensive and independent review must be conducted to ensure these problems are not repeated in future executions.”

Hobbs has apparently changed her mind: this week, she fired the retired federal magistrate judge conducting the review based on an eight-page letter from a subordinate.

Arizona’s Lethal Injection Review Was Set to Conclude It Couldn’t Be Done

Former federal judge David Duncan and Hobbs disagree on the scope her executive order gave to his review. According to Hobbs (via a letter shared with local outlet 12News), Duncan’s review was limited to “reviewing the State's procurement of execution drugs, as well as the policies and protocols in place for carrying out an execution under existing law.” Duncan, meanwhile, believed he had Duncan says the state told him they wanted to, in the governor’s own words, “make sure the practices are sound and that we don't end up with botched executions like we've seen recently.“

Where Duncan apparently went too far, according to Hobbs’s letter, is in suggesting a fix. The fatal flaw of the report is “recommend[s] that ADCRR conduct executions by firing squad (a method not currently authorized by Arizona law).” Duncan doesn’t deny this, stating that it “overcome[s] the impediments to lethal injection from unavailability of material and skilled personnel.”2

Reading Duncan’s description of his outline (or any reporting on lethal injection), one wonders what options he was left. Reputable manufacturers won’t help them. Qualified practitioners want nothing to do with it. And above all, the cloud of secrecy under which executioners operate means that “no best practices ever emerge, no mistakes are shared, no lessons are ever learned or shared with other people.” If Duncan uncovered anything new, it was of degree, not type: his outline apparently reports “corrections officials seeking to learn on the eve of an execution what doses of lethal drugs to administer from Wikipedia.”

The Letter on Which Governor Hobbs Based Her Decision Gives Little Confidence in Future Executions

According to the letter from Hobbs to Duncan, the former based her decision to fire Duncan and resume executions based on a letter she received herself, from ADCRR Director Ryan Thornell. The letter spans just eight pages, and while it undoubtedly contains some improvements over the previous protocol, many are at best oversimplifications of the issues causing previous botched executions:

• The Department has abandoned its previous “medical/IV team,” bringing on an independent and expanded new one—including “2 medical doctors“ and “a phlebotomist, providing a level of expertise to the team related to IV placement procedures.“ As we’ve discussed before, simply being a physician does not guarantee the experience and renewed expertise required in the fields that most closely mimic lethal injection; the family doctor who oversaw Clayton Lockett’s execution requested unavailable equipment and attempted a central line placement with inappropriate IV supplies. And phlebotomy, a profession that trains for routine blood draws in low-pressure settings, are not any more qualified to solve problems with IV insertion that currently plague lethal injection nationwide than the paramedics currently required for the team.3

• Based on “inconsistency in the record” that no one else is allowed to see, Arizona has declared itself unable to answer questions about previous attempts to place central lines during executions. Instead, the “the Department has now clearly identified the Director’s role in decision-making and the role of the medical/IV team leader in informing the Director to aid this.” There is no mention of how the Director will come to this decision, other than assurances that “I will not make decisions without the advice of the trained and qualified medical/IV team.” The first-person framing here—a personal commitment rather than a protocol change—also raises questions of how permanent this change will be.

• Thornell’s letter assures the governor that the “the Department has been in discussion with multiple other states to discuss their execution procedures and has traveled to 2 states as part of its review and preparation process,” presumably attempting to draw on supposed best practices to ensure humane executions. Interstate collaboration, however, has been part of lethal injection since its inception, a practice that has only intensified with the loss of open execution drug markets. If prison bosses putting their heads together could have solved lethal injection’s issues, it would have done so by now.

Notably, despite the governor’s 2023 highlighting transparency concerns surrounding lethal injection, the letter makes no reference to increasing that transparency, instead treating official secrecy with respect to execution suppliers and colleagues as necessary if not outright good. Nonetheless, Thornell’s declaration that his department was “operationally ready” to conduct executions became the order of the day, with Arizona’s Attorney General Kris Mayes seeking death warrants for as early as next year. The governor’s spokesperson “did not answer a question of whether the governor believes the way the state is now executing inmates fits her definition of what is humane.”