by Nicole Santa Cruz, ProPublica, and Dave Biscobing, ABC15 Arizona

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Watch ABC15 Arizona's series "Seeking Death," based on our joint investigation into Maricopa County's handling of death penalty cases.

In 2010, Vikki Valencia’s 24-year-old brother, Triny Rey Lozano, died in an almost unimaginably brutal way. He was shot in the head multiple times, dumped on a remote road outside Phoenix and set on fire.

Valencia saw only one way prosecutors could bring her family justice: The killer should get the death penalty.

Maricopa County prosecutors built a capital murder case against the man they say killed Lozano, Victor Hernandez.

Valencia knew it would take a long time but believed it would be worth it. Over nearly 10 years, she visited the courthouse hundreds of times, frequently missing work to attend hearings where she revisited traumatic images of the crime scene.

“The death penalty was the thing that we wanted most because we thought it was going to give us justice,” she said in a recent interview.

During jury selection, the case stalled because of a potential conflict of interest involving a prosecutor who had previously represented Hernandez. Years later, a second trial followed. As that jury was deliberating, prosecutors dropped the death penalty. Nine years after he was charged with killing Lozano, Hernandez was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Although the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has historically pursued the death penalty at high rates, its efforts rarely result in a death sentence.

ProPublica and ABC15 Arizona reviewed nearly 350 cases over a 20-year period in which Maricopa County prosecutors decided the crimes warranted the death penalty, and found that 13% ended in a death sentence. In most of the cases, defendants either pleaded guilty and received a lesser sentence or prosecutors changed course, ending their pursuit of the death penalty.

In 76 trials in which Maricopa County juries deliberated a death sentence, 41, or 54%, yielded one.

By comparison, an analysis of death penalty cases initiated in Harris County, Texas, from 2004 through 2023, found prosecutors took fewer cases, 24, to trial and were more successful, obtaining a death sentence 75% of the time, according to figures provided by a local advocacy group. Data over a longer time period also shows that federal prosecutors nationwide have obtained death sentences at a higher rate than in Maricopa County, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project.

Pursuing the death penalty is among the most consequential decisions that prosecutors make. Each case can be litigated across the tenures of multiple county attorneys and can cost more than a million dollars. In the hundreds of Maricopa County death penalty cases that prosecutors have pursued since 2007, the cost of furnishing the accused with an adequate defense has totaled $289 million. But the outcomes in the county raise questions about the office’s judgment in its pursuit of the ultimate punishment, according to court records and interviews with more than three dozen people including lawyers, former prosecutors, family members of victims and defendants, jurors and experts.

Former County Attorney Rick Romley said there should be a review of capital charging decisions after ProPublica and ABC15 shared the newsrooms’ findings with him. Romley wondered whether prosecutors are seeking death “in the appropriate cases.”

“The jury is kind of a barometer of whether or not you’re doing a good job,” he said. “And quite frankly … if it was a school grade, that’s called an F.”

The office, now headed by Rachel Mitchell, a Republican, declined our request for an interview. A spokesperson responded to written questions, emphasizing that “only one” person in Maricopa County — Mitchell — makes the decision to seek the death penalty and that each case is reviewed throughout the process, as information changes.

Maricopa County’s and the state of Arizona’s handling of the death penalty have been questioned for years. A 2016 report by the now-defunct Fair Punishment Project, a legal and educational research group at Harvard University, cited the county, among other places, as having a history of “overzealous prosecutors, inadequate defense and a pattern of racial bias and exclusion.”

In addition, defense attorneys for a death row prisoner in 2018 petitioned unsuccessfully to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that Arizona’s statute was overly broad because almost every murder can be charged as a capital case. And two former prosecutors and appeals court judges wrote in a 2022 law journal article that state officials, rather than individual counties, should make all death penalty........

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