Date of Firing Squad Execution Vacated for Utah Prisoner with Dementia
by Chuck Sharman
With just a week to go before his scheduled execution by firing squad, attorneys for Utah prisoner Ralph Menzies, 67, won a stay from the state Supreme Court on August 29, 2025, after they successfully argued that his worsening vascular dementia may have robbed him of the ability to connect the punishment to his crime—the 1986 kidnapping and murder of a 26-year old gas station attendant, Maurine Hunsaker.
A state district court issued an execution order earlier in 2025 after hearing evidence the previous December of Menzies’ condition and deciding he was sufficiently competent to be killed. Menzies then chose the firing squad over lethal injection as his preferred method to die. But he also appealed the district court’s competency finding and requested a stay of the execution while it was pending.
When the district court denied that request in June 2025, he filed a petition to have his competency re-evaluated, arguing that his condition had significantly worsened in the six months since his last hearing. Before that request was considered, the district court issued a new execution warrant for September 5, 2025. When it then considered the re-evaluation petition, the same court denied it. Menzies timely appealed both rulings to the state high Court.
The state argued that the Court lacked jurisdiction to hear the appeals. The Court disagreed. Utah Code subsection 77-18a-1(1)(b) provides a right to appeal any post-judgment order “that affects the substantial rights of the defendant,” which an evaluation of competency for execution “undoubtedly” does, the Court said. The state also argued that express statutory authority exists only for the state to appeal competency evaluations for execution. But the Court rejected that contention, saying “[t]his is not a situation where the specific controls over the general,” so the statute’s silence about the defendant’s right to appeal did not foreclose it.
Moving on to the implications of Menzies’ Eighth Amendment guarantee of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, the Court traced the development of case law at the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) from Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986), which excluded insane prisoners from execution, to Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930 (2007), which required them to be able to understand why they were being killed; ultimately, in Madison v. Alabama, 586 U.S. 265 (2019), SCOTUS determined that the state cannot kill a prisoner for a crime he can no longer remember, either.
All parties agreed “that Menzies suffers from vascular dementia,” the Utah Court noted. The question was whether this “prevents him from having a rational understanding of the State’s reasons for executing him.” That, in turn, required what SCOTUS has acknowledged is a fact-intensive review of his case, like the one that the district court had conducted when it denied his initial petition.
However, no such review was ever conducted after Menzie’s filed his petition for re-evaluation because the district court rejected it out-of-hand. That was error, the Court said. At section 77-19-203, the statute provides that no further petition shall be granted unless it “alleges with specificity a substantial change of circumstances subsequent to the previous determination” that “is sufficient to raise a significant question about the inmate’s competency to be executed.” In other words, the district court’s function was one of gatekeeping, and once Menzie’s made a prima-facie showing of his plea, the gate to a more thorough review should have opened. But the district court used the wrong standard and dismissed the petition for re-evaluation for failing to fully make Menzie’s case.
Accordingly, the warrant of execution was vacated and the district court’s rejection of Menzie’s petition for re-evaluation of his competency for execution was overruled, remanding it for a thorough evaluation. Before the Court, Menzie’s was represented by Salt Lake City attorney Eric Zuckerman and Arizona Federal Public Defender’s Office attorneys Jon M. Sands, Lindsey Layer, Jennifer Moreno and Sonia Fleury. See: State v. Menzies, 2025 UT 38.
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