In between the setting of IV lines and the reading of his death warrant, Aaron Gunches uttered his — albeit unofficial — last words.

“What’s the hold up?”

He said the same in a letter to the attorney general’s office years before, after he had waived all his appeals.

“As you know, I’ve done my part, so why isn’t the AG doing his?” Gunches wrote. “What’s the hold up?”

As he wrote letters, as he filed for his own execution, as he lay on the gurney in the execution chamber Wednesday, Gunches was waiting to die. The will for his own death has led to his characterization as a “volunteer.” But his ultimate demise could be put another way — “state-assisted suicide.”

While courts have found death row inmates to be “competent” to maintain the right to expedite their own execution, some argue the legal bar to do so sits too low, especially amid a lack of information from the inmate himself.

Gunches is one of more than 165 death row inmates to vie for their own deaths since 1972. According to an October 2024 analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center, the rate of inmates who seek their own executions, 137 per 100,000. That rate is ten times higher than the suicide rate of the general public, 14.2 per 100,000, and slightly higher than the suicide rate among death row inmates, 129.7 per 100,000.

DPIC defines a “volunteer” as “a prisoner who takes affirmative steps to hasten their execution, including waiving appeals, asking for an execution date, or instructing their attorneys not to file end-stage litigation.”

Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, a Catholic anti-death penalty group, said she thinks it better to say “state-assisted suicide.”

“It’s more plain spoken. I think it’s more honest about what it is. It’s to aid in dying,” Vaillancourt Murphy said.

“We’ve eliminated any option for hope by the very practice of capital punishment… When someone’s offering them lethal drugs, they’re in a position where they’ve lost all hope. They forfeited their appeals, and they have expedited their own death. ”

Gunches waived all representation in his initial trial and his appeals in the aftermath. The state and the Arizona Supreme Court found him competent to waive counsel.

In all of Gunches’ legal proceedings, he offered no mitigating evidence to the jury — no information on any mental illness, substance abuse, history of neglect, abuse or trauma. An Arizona Supreme Court opinion after his second death sentence noted there was a concern that he “was not attempting to avoid the death penalty.”

Jeffrey Kirchmeier, a criminal law professor at City University of New York School of Law, death penalty researcher and former staff attorney for the Arizona Capital Representation Project, noted the lack of information in Gunches’ case.

“There’s no assessment of his background that might help explain someone who hadn’t been violent, or who had no record of violence up to this point … what may have led to this,” Kirchmeier said. “Not excusing anything he did, but helping explain it.”

Gunches filed a motion for his execution in November 2022. Former Attorney General Mark Brnovich initially joined him, but over a changing of the guards, incoming Attorney General Kris Mayes, joined by Gov. Katie Hobbs, pushed pause on capital punishment.

There was legal strife over whether the court could compel an execution on a withdrawn warrant, and later fights over which elected official could file a motion for a death warrant, but there was never any question over whether Gunches could, in a roundabout way, kill himself.

Gunches’ case stands in contrast to that of Robert Comer. Comer, convicted of the first degree murder, kidnapping, assault and sexual assault, moved to waive his appeals in 1998 and engaged in a years-long legal battle to see his sentence carried out.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused the request at first, finding “grave concern that a mentally disabled man may be seeking this court’s assistance in ending his life.” Comer was then assessed for competence at the district court, where experts weighed his mental state and conditions of confinement.

Judge Rosyln Silver finally found Comer’s decision to waive his appeals to be a “rational one.”

Silver wrote. “What is most important to Mr. Comer is that he has the opportunity to choose. He has made a competent and free choice, which is merely an example of doing what you want to do, embodied in the word liberty. He should be afforded that choice.”

Comer’s case, coupled with existing case law allowing inmates found to be “competent” to waive appeals and seek their own warrant, allowed for Gunches to ultimately seek his own death.

When Gunches waived his appeals, two court appointed experts found him to be competent, or to have made the decision “knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily.”

But Kirchmeier claims there still hasn’t been a true comprehensive review to back that up.

“This is just the state helping someone commit suicide.”