Before his report was cut short by Gov. Katie Hobbs, David Duncan, a retired federal magistrate judge, poured over banker boxes of records, interviewed dozens of people at the many nexuses of state executions, and returned a conclusion that execution by lethal injection was untenable. As the state executes another death row inmate, Duncan heeds the call to share his findings.  Why take on the study of the death penalty?  When this idea came up. I was torn. On the one hand, nobody wants to study capital punishment, but on the other hand, the good lawyer knows that the more noxious a subject is, the more important it is that you step up to do it.  At the start of it all, it seemed completely that everybody was on the same page, the governor, the attorney general and me. They asked me to look at three things, and I was comfortable with looking at those three things. They wanted me to figure out what went wrong with the previous executions that people viewed as being botched. And the second question was, can it be done safely? And what that means is, can it be done humanely and overall safely? And the third thing is increased transparency.  What was your process?  I set about interviewing everybody that I could think of who was involved in the process. And those were the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, the family members of victims, doctors, university professors who had studied this subject. I mean virtually everybody, probably a total of around 50 people, and I also read every piece of paper that had been filed in the court of Arizona in the modern era … I read every piece of paper filed in court, and I read every piece of paper that the state of Arizona had in its files, because the governor's executive order empowered me to do that and empowered me to interview everybody who worked for the Department of Corrections. What did you notice over the course of your review?  Every state that has capital punishment has built a silo around its execution process. Nothing permeates it. There is no sharing of information. They don't talk to one another, except in the rarest of instances, and there is no idea of best practices. It's all awkward, cumbersome and uninformed. And I just continue to look at this. I think this is not the way that you develop anything that's going to work well.  That's one of the triad of big issues that dog lethal injection. The first being that there's unavailability of the key drug. The second is the unavailability of anybody who is best suited to do it and the third problem, I already mentioned, is that there's just no information exchange.  What raised red flags for you in studying lethal injection protocol? They paid a million and a half for eight jars of pentobarbital, which is the source salt for making pentobarbital … these eight jars for a million and a half dollars, which probably should cost, you know, $100. I mean, it just seems ridiculous. I went to see those jars. They are in a locked safe, in a locked room with an alarm at the Florence prison. But these eight jars are in the refrigerator with no label at all, nothing, no marking at all. I don't know if you took chemistry, but I know that my chemistry teacher, if I ever had anything in the chem lab that wasn't marked, I would never be invited back to the chem lab. You just don't do that. There's no way to guarantee the provenance of the drug without having some label on it. As I jokingly said … it could have been my mother's minestrone soup.  What about options beyond lethal injection?  I looked at alternatives. What else is there out there? And it seemed to me that the firing squad was a viable alternative … They have plenty of bullets, and they have plenty of people among the employees there who are good marksmen and markswomen. And also you can practice. You can practice over and over again and get very good at hitting a target from 20 feet away, from 12 feet away. That was another issue that bothered me (with lethal injection). I saw endless records of practicing everything except what mattered. They were practicing where they would park the cars, where people would sit, how the letters would go out, inviting people to come. They spent more time deciding who would be the invited to watch an execution than they did rehearsing it. It just was nuts.  When did things take a turn?  I wanted to interview the team that had been hired for the upcoming execution because I wanted to make sure that their qualifications met the task. I wanted to understand as much as I possibly could about their qualifications. They offered to have me draft interrogatory questions and submit those and review the answers. I said, ‘No, I need to sit across from them and look in their faces … Why don't they want to be interviewed by the independent review commissioner?’ And they said, the reason that we don't, that they don't want to, and we don't want you to, is … because they are concerned that you will reveal their identities. And I said, That's preposterous. I'm a retired federal judge. There is a statute that says I cannot reveal their identities. I'm not given to breaking laws.  The idea of starting this process out, seeking to promote transparency, and then shutting it down within a couple of weeks of it being published. It just created, I think in large part, this firestorm … I was totally independent, and came to a conclusion that I think the governor didn't want to hear. What are your biggest fears as we go toward this next execution?  If we choose to have a death penalty, we absolutely have to do it in a humane way, and we can't just wound people and hope they just trail off on us.  How do you move forward now?  I can cite what I saw with my own eyes, and so I freely talk about that. And I have everybody who has asked me to talk about it. I have talked about it. If somebody, somebody has asked me to testify to the Legislature next week. I will do that. Somebody has asked me to appear as an expert witness. I will do that. I'm not a partisan. I'm just an observer of facts. I’ve come to certain conclusions, and I'm not shy about sharing those now.