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In Utah, death row inmates have been sitting in prison awaiting execution for more than three decades. That’s far too long, one Utah legislator says — and she’s proposing a law change that would potentially speed up the process.
Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Herriman, told a legislative committee on Thursday that she believes the death penalty in Utah is broken, and that the appeals process is taking so long that condemned men are dying of natural causes before they can be executed.
That includes Ralph Menzies, she said, an inmate who was on death row for 36 years before his execution was called off last year because of concerns that he was not mentally competent. The man, who had vascular dementia, died three months after the Utah Supreme Court stopped his scheduled firing squad execution.
“We say in Utah, we have the death penalty,” Pierucci said. “But do we really?”
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Riverton, leads a meeting of the Legislative Redistricting Committee last September.
Pierucci has proposed HB495, legislation she said would speed up the death penalty appeals process in several ways: It would require a psychologist to examine a defendant’s IQ early in the court process to ensure they are eligible to be executed, and once a defendant is convicted, it would limit when a defense attorney can raise a concern about their client’s competency.
Among other changes, the bill would also ban defendants from raising concerns in an appeal to the Utah Supreme Court about whether their trial attorneys were effective, Pierucci said, explaining that would have to take place solely in a separate post-conviction lawsuit.
The legislator said that, nationally, the average time a condemned person sits on death row is 22 years. Utah currently has three death row inmates, all who have been sitting on death row for more than three decades.
“If you had followed the Ralph Menzies case, he sat on death row for 36 years,” she told members of the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee. “And people have said he’s an outlier, but he’s not if you look at the next three individuals who are on death row.”
The committee moved the bill forward despite strong criticism from Utah defense attorneys, including those who have defended the condemned for decades. They argued that the bill is trying to address failures of the death penalty system in the 1980s, rather than how it’s currently run.
“There’s a difference between back then and now,” said Richard Mauro, the executive director of the Salt Lake Legal Defender Association, which contracts to handle public defender cases in Salt Lake County.
Mark Moffat, with Utah’s defense lawyer association, told the committee that what’s changed is that defense attorneys now have to be specially trained and qualified to handle a death penalty case.
“The state of death penalty litigation in the 1980s was super unsophisticated when it came to defense lawyers,” Moffat said. “The defense lawyers who were taking the cases were people who were very well-intended, they believed in the cause. But they weren’t adequately trained in death penalty representation.”
“As a result, there were numerous, numerous errors,” Moffat added.
That’s what has caused these cases to drag on for so many years, Moffat said, not a broken process. He theorized that today’s death penalty cases would not take so long.
Defense attorney Eric Zuckerman, who represented Menzies, told the committee on Thursday that Taberon Honie’s lethal injection death two years ago shows that the system is speeding up once Utah put rules in place for better qualified defense attorneys.
Honie was convicted in 1999, and was executed 25 years later. (Zuckerman also represented Honie in his final efforts to stop his death.)
While Pierucci’s bill wouldn’t affect those already on death row, she told The Salt Lake Tribune it would apply to pending cases, like that of Tyler Robinson — who prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for in the death of Charlie Kirk. Robinson has not been convicted. This proposal, she said, is not motivated by Robinson’s case.
The legislative committee voted 8-2 to favorably recommend the bill, and it now moves to the full House for consideration.
Tribune journalist Jeff Parrott contributed to this story.