SALT LAKE CITY, Utah Aug. 8, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — As proceedings mounted in Thursday morning’s scheduled execution of Taberon Honie, the first since 2010, the case against another inmate prosecutors seek to execute is back in court.
Death penalty proceedings for Ralph Leroy Menzies are on the docket for Monday as his mental competency evaluation has been completed.
In January Menzies’ public defenders filed 3rd District Court papers to declare the long-time death row inmate had deteriorated to the point he was “incompetent to be executed.” The filing came just days after the Utah Attorney General’s Office filed an application for a warrant of execution for Menzies.
Two mental health professionals from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services were assigned to complete a competency evaluation of Menzies, who turned 66 in April.
The doctors on June 28 formally requested more time to complete their evaluation, court records show. The competency report, marked private, was finally filed with court, marked private, on July 22.
On July 31 a status hearing regarding the report was set for Aug. 12 before Judge Matthew Bates in West Jordan’s 3rd District Court.
Monday Menzies attorney, Eric Zuckerman, filed orders for two subpoenas with the court for the competency report and the doctor’s notes and working materials, according to court files.
The second subpoena seeks the internal communications of the Attorney General’s Office regarding the competency evaluation.
Menzies was convicted in 1988 of the aggravated murder, kidnapping and robbery of Hunsaker, a 26-year-old mother of three and convenience store clerk taken from her job in Kearns. Her body was found two days later, tied to a tree and with her throat cut, in a Storm Mountain picnic area in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
His attorneys’ filing for the competency evaluation argued Menzies has been diagnosed with dementia, and so “is unable to rationally understand the State’s rationale for his execution.”
Because of that, “the execution will violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which “prohibit(s) a State from carrying out a sentence of death upon a prisoner who is insane” and would also violate Utah code prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
The filing says a recent MRI scan “shows significant brain atrophy, chronic micro-hemorrhages, and damaged brain tissue, which have resulted in substantial deficits in Mr. Menzies’s learning, memory, information processing, abstract reasoning, and problem solving.
“Mr. Menzies was recently evaluated by a neurologist who confirmed a diagnosis of vascular dementia and a neuropsychologist who has determined that, as a result of Mr. Menzies’s dementia, his cognitive state is so impaired that he is unable to rationally understand the State’s rationale for his execution.”
