Ralph Leroy Menzies appears for a competency hearing in 3rd District Court in West Jordan on Monday, Nov 18, 2024. (Pool photo by Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune)
Monday marked the start of a five-day competency hearing for Utah death row inmate Ralph Menzies, where his attorneys will try to argue that the 65-year-old convicted murderer with dementia is so mentally impaired that he cannot face execution.
Menzies’ brain, his attorneys say, is literally wasting away. “It’s indisputable that Mr. Menzies has brain damage,” his attorney Eric Zuckerman told the judge during Monday’s hearing.
Menzies was convicted in 1988 for kidnapping and murdering Maurine Hunsaker, who was working as a cashier at a Kearns gas station. Menzies took Hunsaker up Big Cottonwood Canyon, keeping her overnight in a picnic area. Two days later, her body was found tied to a tree with her throat slashed.
Maurine’s son, Matt Hunsaker, doesn’t believe his mother’s killer is incompetent. “He knows what he did,” he told reporters on Monday.
Over the last decade, Menzies’ cognitive decline, brought on by vascular dementia, has been noticeable, according to testimony on Monday — so much that his attorneys say he doesn’t know why he’s facing execution, and cannot make the connection between his crime and the punishment.
Those are symptoms of vascular dementia, experts testified on Monday. It’s a condition where the brain’s blood flow is disrupted, leading to memory loss and declining cognitive function. An MRI exam showed Menzies’ brain tissue is deteriorating, and his balance is fraught, causing him to fall several times each month.
Over the next five days, 3rd District Court Judge Matthew Bates will hear arguments for and against declaring Menzies incompetent.
If Menzies’ attorneys prove his incompetence, he will still spend the rest of his life in prison, but it will likely mark the end of the state’s pursuit of the death penalty. Matt Hunsaker told reporters after the hearing that if Menzies is found incompetent, his family will no longer advocate for his execution. He believes the state will follow suit.
That doesn’t mean Hunsaker thinks Menzies should be spared.
“He deserves to be executed,” Hunsaker said. “He does not deserve to be here.”
If he’s found competent, Menzies could face execution by firing squad sometime in the spring. There could be more appeals, including a possible clemency hearing in front of the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. But determining his competency is the last major hurdle the state must clear before his death sentence is carried out.
In Utah, death row inmates sentenced before May 2004 had a choice between lethal injection and firing squad. For those sentenced after 2004, the default method of execution is lethal injection, unless the necessary drugs are not available.
Menzies arrives in court
Menzies’ deteriorating health was noticeable on Monday.
At 9 a.m., officers with the Utah Department of Corrections pushed the wheelchair-bound inmate into the courtroom. With a freshly shaved head and a long, somewhat unkempt, white beard, Menzies wore black-rimmed glasses with red lenses to ease his sensitivity to light, a symptom of his brain damage, his attorneys said. Slouched in his wheelchair, he appeared uncomfortable at times, at one point asking the judge for an extra set of handcuffs to help with his shoulder mobility. He seemed to fall asleep more than once, his head slumped and his eyes closed.
In Utah, a competency review must determine whether the inmate is aware of their impending execution and know that a murder conviction is the reason why.
That standard is unconstitutional, said Zuckerman during his opening statement, pointing to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found an inmate should instead have a “rational understanding” of the case.
That means a prisoner should grasp the execution’s meaning and purpose and make a link between his crime and the punishment — in this case, that the murder of Maurine Hunsaker in 1986 was particularly severe in relation to other crimes.
“Even if Mr. Menzies knows and can state his reason for execution, that’s not enough,” Zuckerman said.
Attorneys for the state did not present an opening statement on Monday, but later in the hearing said they disagreed with Zuckerman’s claim that Utah’s standard for competency was unconstitutional.
Menzies’ attorneys called two witnesses on Monday — Dr. Erin Bigler, a neuropsychologist, and Dr. Thomas Hyde, a neurologist.
Hyde, who has diagnosed countless patients with dementia, has performed somewhere between 35 to 40 reviews on death row inmates to determine whether they were competent to be executed.
Of those, three were deemed incompetent, all of them having some kind of vascular disease, like Menzies.
Hyde evaluated Menzies twice — when they met in September 2023, Menzies had trouble with basic cognitive tests, he said. He had difficulty with completing simple drawings, required questions to be repeated multiple times, had poor balance and a tremor in his arm, and became increasingly restless and agitated as the evaluation progressed.
“He had a multitude of abnormalities,” Hyde said.
And by the second time Hyde evaluated Menzies, his physical appearance was in decline.
“He came in looking quite disheveled. He had a beard, it was obvious he hadn’t shaved in a while, his hair was a mess,” said Hyde, telling the judge that basic hygiene like showering, shaving and flushing his toilet were all falling by the wayside.
He would often misplace his dentures and forget to take his medication. When asked why he was sentenced to death, he gave several answers, including a rambling response accusing his judge, the state and the media of conspiring against him.
Eventually, he told Hyde: “The most heinous people need to die for killing people to show people that killing people was wrong.”
When asked whether he considered Menzies competent to be executed Hyde said he did not.
Bigler came to a similar conclusion on Monday, pointing to MRI scans as evidence that Menzies’ dementia is shrinking his brain, causing significant impairment.
“It reduces his ability to retain and recall information,” Bigler said. “It diminishes his capacity to use rational understanding and to utilize cognitive function to understand the complexities of what is going on.”
But Matt Hunsaker, speaking to reporters after the hearing, was skeptical of the argument from Menzies’ attorneys and the doctors who testified.
“I believe he’s being prodded on what to do by his attorneys, how to act, some of the responses that are given to the questions,” Hunsaker said. “It’s a game of chess.”
A competency hearing is similar to a trial, except the burden of proof is now on the defense, not the prosecution. Although there is no jury, a judge still hears witness testimony and both the defense and prosecution can cross-examine witnesses.
Throughout the week, multiple experts will testify in the case. Ultimately, the decision will be left to Bates, the judge.
“Today we heard expert testimony that establishes the severity of Mr. Menzies’ cognitive decline due to vascular dementia, which prevents him from rationally understanding the reason the state seeks to execute him. In the coming days, we will hear additional evidence from experts that further demonstrates that he is ineligible to be executed because of these cognitive deficits,” said Zuckerman in a statement after the hearing.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.