Ralph Menzies’ attorneys say his dementia is getting worse, and he now requires full-time care at Utah’s prison. A judge on Wednesday signed a death warrant ordering he be executed in September.
A Utah judge on Wednesday set a September execution date for Ralph Menzies, who has been on death row for nearly 40 years for kidnapping and brutally killing a young mother.
Third District Judge Matthew Bates’ decision to sign a death warrant comes a month after he ruled that Menzies’ dementia did not affect the 67-year-old’s competency to the point where he could not legally be executed.
This week, however, Menzie’s attorneys filed a new motion arguing that the death row inmate has continued to mentally decline in the months after experts assessed him — opinions which Bates relied on when determining Menzies’ competency. Now, his lawyers say, Menzies has a full-time aide in the prison who helps him get meals and other daily tasks that he can’t do on his own.
He appeared in court on Wednesday in a wheelchair and using an oxygen tank, which his attorneys say he uses continuously at the prison.
“Dementia doesn’t get better,” defense attorney Eric Zuckerman said during Wednesday’s court hearing. “It’s a clear progression. It gets worse over time.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Ralph Menzies speaks with his attorney in a West Jordan courtroom on July 9, 2025, just after 3rd District Judge Matthew Bates signed a death warrant ordering that the inmate be executed by firing squad in September.
Bates said that he was legally required to sign the death warrant on Wednesday, which orders that Menzies be executed by firing squad on Sept. 5.
But the judge also scheduled a hearing for later this month, where attorneys will argue whether Menzies should be evaluated again to determine whether he is still considered competent — or if his dementia has progressed to the point where he can no longer understand what’s happening. (Both Utah’s and the United States’ constitution prohibits the government from executing someone if they don’t understand that they are being executed and the reasons why.)
While the potential for another delay over competency is possible, Matt Hunsaker, the victim’s son, said he felt that — at last — he could start to prepare himself and his family for the execution of his mother’s killer after waiting for nearly 40 years.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Matt Hunsaker said that after decades of waiting, he feels “overwhelmed” and “happy” that a judge on Wednesday signed an execution warrant for Ralph Menzies, the man who murdered Hunsaker’s mother in 1986. He spoke with the media after a court hearing on July 9, 2025.
In 1986, Menzies kidnapped Maurine Hunsaker, a 26-year-old mother, from a Kearns gas station, slit her throat and left her body tied to a tree near a picnic area in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
“I’m preparing myself to go see somebody’s life taken from them,” Hunsaker said after the judge signed the death warrant. “This is going to be a humane sort of way; his life will be over in mere seconds. My mom, we don’t know how long she stood there and suffered in that grove.”
Maurine Hunsaker
Eric Zuckerman, one of Menzies’ attorneys, said they’ll seek relief with the Utah Supreme Court and the parole board’s clemency process in an effort to halt the execution.
“We remain hopeful that the courts or the clemency board will recognize the inhumanity of taking a man like him into the death chamber,” he told reporters. “Taking him out of his wheelchair, and executing him, it’s wrong. And Utah can do better.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Defense attorney Eric Zuckerman told reporters that it would be inhumane to execute Ralph Menzies, who has dementia and uses a wheelchair and an oxygen tank. A judge on Wednesday, July 9, 2025 signed a death warrants for Menzies, ordering that he be executed on Sept. 5.
Assistant Utah Attorney General Daniel Boyer said Wednesday that the state’s not convinced that Menzies’ attorneys have enough evidence to warrant another look at the man’s competency — but added that they’ll review the defense’s motion for another competency review and respond in writing.
A jury in 1988 ordered Menzies to die for killing Hunsaker, and he’s been appealing the decision ever since. If he is executed, he will be the second Utah death row inmate to be executed in recent years after Taberon Honie died by lethal injection last August.
Utah has not executed someone by a firing squad since 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed.
Source: Utah News