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SALT LAKE CITY — A day after an application for his execution warrant was filed by the state of Utah, death row inmate Ralph Menzies told the court he intends to respond — and he wants the court to hold off on scheduling a hearing until he has a chance to do so.
Menzies, 65, was found guilty of aggravated murder, a capital offense, and aggravated kidnapping, a first-degree felony, on March 9, 1988, and sentenced to death two weeks later.
He announced his intent to submit a written response to the application for an execution warrant in a document filed on Thursday.
The motion, filed by assistant federal public defender Eric Zuckerman, said Utah's Rules of Criminal Procedure are not clear on the time limit for filing a response, but that Menzies plans to file the response before the end of the month. It asked the court not to set a hearing on the execution warrant until after the defense has had a chance to respond.
In the request for an execution warrant, prosecutors asked for the court to bring Menzies before the court so a judge could issue an execution warrant.
Shortly after Menzies was sentenced, and after the first execution warrant was issued on March 30, 1988, the court put his death sentence on hold pending an appeal. The sentence was affirmed multiple times, including at the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Most recently, in October 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case.
Menzies was found guilty of killing Maurine Hunsaker, a mother of three. She was working at a gas station in Kearns in 1986, and called to tell her husband she was abducted but believed she would be released. Two days later, her body was found in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
An execution warrant, when granted, includes the conviction and outlines the method and date of execution, according to Utah code. The date must be between 30 and 60 days from the date the warrant is issued.
Menzies previously requested to die by firing squad, which is still an option in his case because he was convicted before the method was outlawed in Utah in 2004. In 2015, the firing squad was brought back as a backup execution method to lethal injections in Utah, in case there came a time when lethal drugs could not be obtained.
It's been more than a decade since Utah has performed an execution. The last one occurred on June 18, 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by firing squad for killing attorney Michael Burdell while attempting to escape from a courtroom in 1985.
In December, a judge decided to uphold the death penalty statute and dismiss a lawsuit filed by Menzies and four other inmates on death row. They had claimed that capital punishment statutes are cruel and unusual punishment.
