Tracking Transparency: The secrecy surrounding Utah's death penalty process

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Utah's new law increases secrecy around the death penalty process, sparking debate.
Critics argue public deserves transparency; officials cite safety for execution team members.
Ralph Menzies' execution is scheduled, with ongoing legal efforts to prevent it.

SALT LAKE CITY — Recent changes to state law keep Utahns in the dark when it comes to certain information about the state's death penalty process.

As death row inmate Ralph Menzies' attorneys are pursuing several legal efforts to prevent his execution by firing squad, the Utah Department of Corrections is preparing to carry out his death sentence.

Menzies, 67, is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 5 by firing squad for the 1986 kidnapping and murder of 26-year-old Maurine Hunsaker. The mother of three was found deceased in Big Cottonwood Canyon two days after Menzies abducted her from a gas station in Kearns.

"It's a controversial issue, and there are really deep emotions on both sides of that issue," said Glen Mills, with Utah's Department of Corrections.

Utah's Legislature and Gov. Spencer Cox decided to make the process more secretive with legislation passed in 2024.

"State law prohibits us from revealing the identity of anyone who participates in an execution team," said Mills.

That includes the eight-member execution team the department is in the process of recruiting right now: one team leader, two alternates and five shooters. Under Utah law, the public will not get to know who those people are, just like Utahns don't know who participated in an execution by lethal injection last year or where the drugs purchased with $200,000 in taxpayer funds came from.

"The secrecy that states choose to surround their protocol, their procedures, their decision-making behind is really inconsistent with all of the values that we value in a democratic society," said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The nonprofit tracking capital punishment across the country doesn't take a position on the death penalty, but Maher said the public has a right to know about how the government is exercising perhaps its most serious and consequential power when it puts a person to death.

"This is a government function using taxpayer funds and the public deserves to understand all of the details associated with this decision and these executions," said Maher.

Mills said the protection built into the law for people involved in executions is critical to carrying them out.

"You really can't even do business if people fear that their name is potentially going to be out there for opponents of the death penalty to potentially come after with doxing or other potential methods to try to intimidate and get them not to do that," said Mills.

"Well, there's really no empirical evidence," Maher countered to that reasoning. "There's no examples at all of anyone being targeted for harassment for participating in executions."

She noted that some drug manufacturers have stopped supplying pharmaceutical drugs to prisons because they object to their drug being used in executions. And in Idaho, the state struggled to find contractors willing to work on renovations to its death chamber.

"That's something that we're used to in a capitalistic society," said Maher. "We make our decisions based on what we buy and what we choose to sell and that's different from the kind of threats that have been alleged by many states that try to justify their secrecy proceedings with that example."

Mills said the changes to the law aid in their efforts to staff an execution.

"One, it's a matter of us being able to recruit the people that we need to fulfill that statutory obligation," he said. "And two, to protect them from any potential harm that could come from it."

The state has shared the criteria for the execution team: They must be certified peace officers, demonstrate firearm proficiency and pass mental strength tests.

Menzies is set to appear at a commutation hearing before Utah's Board of Pardons and Parole ahead of his scheduled execution and has other legal efforts pending. A date for the hearing has not yet been set. In June, a judge found him competent to be executed despite a diagnosis of dementia, but is currently considering whether his competency should be evaluated again.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.