A judge said he will decide within the next 60 days whether Ralph Menzies, convicted of kidnapping and killing a woman in 1986, is competent enough to be executed.
Utah 3rd District Judge Matthew Bates announced his timeline during a hearing Wednesday in his West Jordan courtroom.
Menzies was first sentenced to death in 1988, after a jury found him guilty of killing Maurine Hunsaker. 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.
In January 2024, the Utah Attorney General’s Office asked for a judge to sign the death warrant, but federal public defenders asked Bates to consider Menzies’ competency.
Last November — after Menzies was examined by multiple mental health and neuroscience professionals retained by state prosecutors, the court and his defense attorneys — the attorneys argued before Bates about the man’s competency in a weeklong hearing.
Menzies’ defense attorneys argue that Utah’s current threshold for competency to be executed is unconstitutional.
They said the current standard used by the state requires someone to be aware of their execution and why they will be killed. They argued that the Supreme Court has decided that people must understand why the state is executing them for their crime and the societal goals the state has in doing so, a standard they say Menzies does not meet.
Prosecutors argue that while the state’s standard is constitutional, Menzies would still qualify for execution even with the more stringent competency requirements his lawyers are seeking.
“It is clear that Menzies understands both the broader societal goals of the death penalty and that it does not apply to every murder,” they said in a brief filed earlier this year.
Prosecutors also say that while each professional who examined Menzies said he has some degree of neurocognitive disorder — though they disagreed on its severity — that doesn’t mean he’s incompetent. And, they pointed out during Wednesday’s hearing, the professionals who deemed Menzies incompetent for execution were the professionals retained by his defense.
Bates asked one of Menzies’ attorneys, Lindsey Layer, what he would need to understand in order to be eligible for the death penalty. She explained that he needs to understand the execution would be in retribution of his crime and its severity and to deter others from committing similar acts.
