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Peasley’s defense turned into a request for pity—something he rarely dispensed as a prosecutor. During the Minnitt trial in 1997, Stuehringer wrote in a brief, Peasley had “vision problems, periodic vertigo, mini-strokes, difficulties in focusing and concentration,” so his “physical problems and workload were affecting his ability to function as a lawyer in the courtroom.” But his health problems in 1997 didn’t explain why he had put forward the false evidence in 1993. Today, Peasley doesn’t exactly defend his conduct, though he insists that any mistakes he made were unintentional. “I’m the one who screwed up,” he told me. “I gave them the opportunity to claim what they claimed and to say what they’ve said. And I don’t miss that. And I’m responsible for that.”

In 2002, the Arizona Supreme Court overturned Minnitt’s conviction and death sentence and ruled that double jeopardy barred another trial, which would have been his fourth. “The record is replete with evidence of Peasley’s full awareness that [Godoy’s] testimony was utterly false,” the justices wrote. “Peasley’s misdeeds were not isolated events but became a consistent pattern of prosecutorial misconduct that began in 1993 and continued through retrial in 1997.” Like McCrimmon, Minnitt was now left to serve out the remainder of his thirty-six-year sentence for the Mariano’s Pizza shooting.

Finally, on May 28, 2004, the court, following up on its criticism of Peasley in the Minnitt opinion, ordered him disbarred, noting that his behavior “could not have been more harmful to the justice system.” On behalf of a unanimous court, Justice Michael D. Ryan wrote, “A prosecutor who deliberately presents false testimony, especially in a capital case, has caused incalculable injury to the integrity of the legal profession and the justice system.”

Even with Peasley’s disbarment, the story of the El Grande murders was not over. Just a few weeks before that decision, the Arizona court had issued another unanimous order: a warrant of execution for Martin Soto-Fong. The defendant, the court wrote, “shall be executed by administering to MARTIN RAUL SOTO-FONG an intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause death, except that MARTIN RAUL SOTO-FONG shall have the choice of either lethal injection or lethal gas.”

THE ARIZONA STATE-PRISON COMPLEX, in Florence, sits on a barren stretch of desert about fifty miles off the main highway between Phoenix and Tucson. Inside the old prison yard is a small, one-story blue stucco structure that is identified on the outside as “Housing Unit 9.” It’s better known as the death house. The arrangement inside the building reflects the choice now available to Martin Soto-Fong. A carpeted room for spectators has one window facing the gas chamber and another facing the room holding the gurney used for administering lethal injections. (The only sign inside the building is an Air Quality Control Permit, issued by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to “the Florence Prison Gas Chamber.”) Meg Savage, a genial middle-aged woman who is a warden at one of the units in Florence, took me behind the window to the gas chamber itself, where the swinging metal door was open. “You can sit in it if you like,” she said.

Death row in Arizona has a dramatic history. In 1982, a condemned prisoner known as “Banzai Bob” Vickers killed another death-row inmate by setting him on fire; he soaked toilet paper with Vitalis, set it aflame, and threw it between the bars of the man’s cell. (Vickers was executed in 1999.) In 1997, another condemned prisoner, Floyd Thornton, was weeding the prison vegetable garden when his wife drove up to the fence and tried to help him escape. She started shooting an AK-47 assault rifle and a .41-calibre revolver, but both Thornton and his wife were killed after guards returned the fire. These incidents, coupled with the general trend toward ever-greater prison security, have led Arizona to establish one of the most restrictive death rows in the country.

The condemned are now housed in