Three women are currently on death row in Arizona: Wendi Andriano, Shawna Forde, and Sammantha Allen. All three are held at the Lumley Unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex in Perryville, near Goodyear, and all three are still moving through the appeals process. None has an execution date.1Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry. Death Row Information They make up a small share of Arizona’s roughly 110 condemned inmates.
Wendi Andriano
Andriano was sentenced to death in December 2004 for killing her husband, Joe Andriano, on October 7, 2000. Joe was terminally ill with cancer at the time. Trial evidence showed that Wendi poisoned his food with sodium azide, an industrial chemical, then beat him at least twenty-three times in the back of the head with a barstool and stabbed him in the neck with enough force to sever his carotid artery.2FindLaw. State v. Andriano The medical examiner attributed the death to the blunt force trauma and the stab wound.
Prosecutors pursued two aggravating factors: that the killing was especially cruel and depraved, and that Andriano murdered Joe in expectation of financial gain. Evidence showed she had tried to take out life insurance on him and had discussed staging his death to look like a heart attack.3vLex. State v. Andriano The defense argued that Joe, facing a terminal diagnosis, had taken his own life and that Wendi had only tried to help him. The jury rejected that account.
Her appeal of the death sentence remains unresolved.
Shawna Forde
Forde was sentenced to death in 2011 for planning a home invasion in Arivaca, Arizona, on May 30, 2009, that killed 29-year-old Raul Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia. Forde was the self-proclaimed leader of a private border-vigilante group called Minutemen American Defense. She targeted the Flores home believing Raul was a drug dealer, intending to steal money and guns to fund her organization.4FindLaw. State v. Forde
Forde recruited two accomplices, Jason Bush and Albert Gaxiola. The three arrived at the Flores home disguised as law enforcement. Raul was shot and killed. Brisenia was executed at close range. Raul’s wife, Gina, was shot but survived, called 911, and identified the attackers. The jury found multiple aggravating circumstances for each murder, including that Brisenia was under fifteen years old.4FindLaw. State v. Forde
Her case has moved into federal habeas corpus. A federal district court granted a stay of the federal proceedings while she finishes exhausting challenges in state court, and she files status reports every ninety days.5Justia. Forde v. Shinn, Order Granting Stay
Sammantha Allen
Allen, also known as Sammantha Uriarte, was sentenced to death in 2017 for the murder of her ten-year-old cousin, Ame Deal, on July 12, 2011. Trial evidence established that Allen and other adults in the household had subjected Ame to prolonged abuse. On the night Ame died, Allen and her husband forced the child into a small plastic footlocker in a garage with no air conditioning during an Arizona summer night. Ame suffocated and died from heat exposure before morning.6Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Sammantha Allen Receives Death Penalty for Murder of 10-Year-Old Cousin
Allen was convicted of felony murder, conspiracy to commit child abuse, negligent child abuse, and two counts of intentional child abuse. The jury weighed the cruelty of the killing against mitigating factors that included her age, lack of a prior record, and her own abusive upbringing, and returned a death verdict. In 2022, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld her death sentence on appeal, though it remanded one count of negligent child abuse for resentencing on procedural grounds. Her case is now in the post-conviction phase.
Where Their Cases Stand
Arizona law requires the state Supreme Court to independently review every death sentence. The court examines the trial court’s findings on aggravating and mitigating circumstances and decides whether the death sentence was appropriate. If it finds the mitigating evidence substantial enough to call for leniency, it can reduce the sentence to life imprisonment on its own.7Arizona Legislature. Arizona Revised Statutes Title 13 Section 13-755
After that review, a condemned inmate can file for post-conviction relief in state court on grounds like ineffective assistance of counsel or newly discovered evidence. If state courts deny relief, the inmate can petition a federal district court for habeas corpus review.8Maricopa County. Capital Post-Conviction Relief Court The full process routinely takes a decade or more. Andriano, Forde, and Allen are at different points along it.
Executions in Arizona are also effectively paused. The state went eight years without an execution before carrying out three in 2022, and problems with all three prompted Governor Katie Hobbs to issue an executive order in January 2023 creating an independent review of execution protocols, drug procurement, and staffing. The attorney general withdrew the state’s only pending request for an execution date, and no new dates have been sought since.
Where They Are Held
All three women are confined in the Lumley Unit at Arizona State Prison Complex–Perryville, near Goodyear. The unit holds female death row inmates in close custody, the second-highest security classification in the state system.1Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry. Death Row Information
Despite the security level, condemned women receive the same privileges as other close-custody inmates: out-of-cell recreation time, access to programs, contact visitation, phone calls, and commissary purchases. Each inmate has a tablet with digital access to library books, educational materials, and legal research databases. Unit libraries stock Arizona-specific legal resources, and inmates have unlimited access to their own legal materials.1Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry. Death Row Information Healthcare and mental health services are provided. Privileges can be adjusted based on an inmate’s behavior phase within the ADCRR system.
Historical Context: Milke and Dugan
Two other names come up in any look at women and Arizona’s death penalty, and neither is on the row today.
Debra Milke was convicted in 1990 of arranging the murder of her four-year-old son, Christopher, and spent 22 years on death row. The prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on a confession that a Phoenix police detective claimed Milke had made during an unrecorded interrogation. Milke always denied confessing. In 2013, a federal appeals court overturned her conviction after finding that prosecutors had withheld evidence of the detective’s extensive history of misconduct, including lying under oath and violating suspects’ constitutional rights during interrogations. Milke was released on bond, and the case was eventually dismissed. When Andriano was sentenced in 2004, Milke was the only other woman on Arizona’s death row at the time.
Only one woman has ever been executed in Arizona. Eva Dugan was hanged at the state prison in Florence on February 21, 1930, after her conviction for the 1927 murder of Andrew J. Mathis, a rancher near Tucson for whom she had worked as a housekeeper. When Dugan dropped through the gallows trapdoor, the force decapitated her. The public outcry pushed Arizona’s legislature to abandon hanging, and within four years the state had adopted the gas chamber.9Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry. Arizona Death Penalty History No woman has been executed in Arizona since.