Ronnie Lee Gardner, who was condemned to die for a 1985 slaying during an escape attempt at a Salt Lake City courthouse, could be at the end of his appeals.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined this week to hear the killer's latest petition, prompting the Utah Attorney General's Office to ask that an execution date be set.
And if a 3rd District judge grants the request, Gardner could be put to death by lethal injection a few months from now, ending a quarter of a century of litigation in his case. His execution would be the first in Utah since 1999.
"He has exhausted the usual course of judicial review," Assistant Attorney General Thomas Brunker said Thursday.
Gardner, now 49, still can ask the Utah Board of Pardons to commute his sentence to life in prison.
A hearing on the execution request probably will be scheduled in about a month. An execution would have to be scheduled no fewer than 30 days and no more than 60 days from the date the warrant is signed.
Gardner tried to escape on April 2, 1985, from the now-demolished courthouse at 250 E. 400 South. He had been brought there for a hearing on charges in the 1984 robbery and fatal shooting of Melvyn John Otterstrom at a Salt Lake City bar.
After someone slipped him a gun, Gardner wounded bailiff Nick Kirk and fatally shot attorney Michael Burdell before being shot in the shoulder and captured on the courthouse lawn. He was sentenced to death for killing Burdell and also received five years to life in prison for killing Otterstrom, a husband and father who was a controller for the Utah Paper Box Co. by day and a part-time bartender in the evening.
The sentence started years of appeals. Gardner periodically asked judges to allow him to die, either saying he was frustrated with delays in the case or racked with pain from rheumatoid arthritis, but then continued to challenge his sentence.
U.S. District Judge Campbell in 2007 rejected all claims in an appeal by Gardner, including his assertion that his trial and appeal lawyers were ineffective because they failed to show he never meant to kill his victim. The judge said there was "overwhelming evidence" that Gardner intended to shoot Burdell.
Gardner appealed to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Campbell's decision last year. He then asked for a review of the 10th Circuit ruling by the Supreme Court, which rejected his petition on Monday.
Utah's death row has 10 inmates, all men.
The last person executed in the state was Joseph Mitchell Parsons, who was strapped on a gurney at the Utah State Prison in Draper on Oct. 15, 1999, and pronounced dead about two minutes after being administered a lethal dose of drugs. Parsons was put to death for murdering Richard Lynn Ernest, a concrete laborer from Loma Linda, Calif., who had given him a ride.
Parsons was the sixth death-row inmate to be executed in Utah since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
