The judge heard six days of testimony about Menzies’ mental state.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Ralph Leroy Menzies, during his competency hearing in 3rd District Court in West Jordan, on Monday, Nov. 18, 2024.
Ralph Leroy Menzies is mentally competent enough to face execution by a firing squad for the 1986 kidnapping and killing of a Utah woman, a state judge has ruled.
The ruling from 3rd District Judge Matthew Bates late Friday afternoon said that Menzies’s attorneys have not proven that the 67-year-old killer is too mentally impaired to be executed.
“Although Menzies has shown he has vascular dementia, he has not shown by a preponderance of the evidence that his mental condition prevents him from reaching a rational understanding of the punishment or the State’s reasons for it,” Bates wrote in his order.
Menzies was first sentenced to die in 1988, after a jury found him guilty of killing Maurine Hunsaker, a 26-year-old mother. Menzies kidnapped Hunsaker from a Kearns gas station, slit her throat and left her body tied to a tree near a picnic area in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
(family photo) Maurine Hunsaker was 26 when she was kidnapped at a Kearns gas station in 1986, then murdered.
Following Friday’s decision, Hunsaker’s son, Matt, said in a text message to Fox 13 that the family is “pleased to know that justice is going to be served for my mom and that Ralph Menzies is not going to skirt facing the justice that he deserves.”
He added that they “look forward to the next step of hopefully a court hearing next week to get a death warrant signed to move this along.”
No date has been set for Menzies’ execution.
And Lindsey Layer, an attorney for Menzies, said his defense disagrees with the court’s decision and plans to appeal to the Utah Supreme Court. They say Menzies cannot understand why the state wants to execute him.
“Ralph Menzies is a severely brain-damaged, wheelchair-bound, 67-year-old man with dementia and significant memory problems,” she said in a statement sent to The Salt Lake Tribune. “His dementia is progressive and he is not going to get better. It is deeply troubling that Utah plans to remove Mr. Menzies from his wheelchair and oxygen tank to strap him into an execution chair and shoot him to death.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | Salt Lake Tribune file photo) Matt Hunsaker, whose mother, Maurine Hunsaker, was killed by Ralph Leroy Menzies in 1986, speaks in opposition as he attends a hearing to repeal Utah’s death penalty in the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee in 2022.
Since his 1988 sentencing, the state has issued several death warrants to carry out Menzies’ execution and Menzies has pursued repeated appeals. The Utah Supreme Court rejected an appeal in 2014, and in 2022, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case the next year.
In November 2023, the Utah Attorney General’s Office posted on its website that Menzies was almost out of time, and would be facing a firing squad. The following January, his attorneys argued that he wasn’t competent to be executed.
The attorney general’s office, in a statement Friday evening, said, “our hearts today are with the family of Maurine Hunsaker and we are committed to seeking justice for her.”
Bates held a six-day hearing in November and December, in his West Jordan courtroom, to hear evidence on whether Menzies met the threshold for competency.
In the hearing, Menzies’ federal public defenders argued that Utah’s current threshold for competency to be executed is unconstitutional.
Under Utah’s standard, they said, a condemned person must be aware of their execution and why they will be killed. The federal standard is more strict, his lawyers said, explaining that it requires that a condemned prisoner must understand the meaning of their execution and the link between the crime, its severity and correlating punishment.
Under that federal standard, Menzies’ lawyers argued, Menzies was not competent to be put to death.
In his ruling, Bates wrote, “it is enough for the Court to find that Menzies understands that he is about to be executed by the State as a punishment for murdering Maurine Hunsaker and that his understanding is not so distorted by his vascular dementia that his execution would not serve a retributive and deterrent purpose.”
Bates ruled that Menzies’ defense team did meet the burden of showing that he has a mental condition. But they did not prove that his condition “prevents him from reaching a rational understanding of the reason for his execution.”