Utah bill would speed up death penalty cases

Utah families should not have to wait three or four decades for justice after unthinkable tragedies, a state lawmaker told colleagues Wednesday. She pitched a plan she said would shorten the timeline on death penalty cases while still respecting the rights of Utahns on death row. 

Rep. Candice Pierruci reminded colleagues in the Utah House of Representatives that Ralph Menzies died of natural causes rather than an execution in December after 37 years on death row for the murder of Maureen Hunsaker. He exhausted appeals but was later diagnosed with dementia, and questions about his mental capacity were still being sorted out in court when he died.

“What we have right now is broken,” said Pierucci, R-Herriman. “We say we have capital punishment in Utah. But do we really? I would argue we do not.”

Pierucci said she’s working with the Utah Attorney General’s Office, which defends death sentences in Utah on appeal. She said the bill sets in place a process that would cut the timeline down to 20 years. 

“We are trying to strike the right balance here,” Pierucci said. 

The House voted 56-13 along party lines to advance HB495 to the Senate, with Democrats in opposition.

Pierucci’s emotional appeal on the House floor met an impassioned rebuttal from Rep. Grant Miller, a criminal defense attorney and Democrat from Salt Lake City. Miller said the bill takes away important guardrails, limiting opportunities for the defense to raise the issue of clients’ cognitive disabilities or inability to understand the case and assist in their own defense.

He said some clients have severe and persistent disabilities that have bearing on the case but do not become apparent to their defense attorneys for a long time. 

“You might think that they’re OK because they’re smiling and they’re nodding. They seem to understand what you’re telling them, until one day, months down the road, all of a sudden, you realize lights are on and no one’s home,” Miller said.

In 2022, arguing the death penalty in the state is more theory than practice, a Republican state lawmaker and a Utahn whose sister and niece were brutally killed urged lawmakers to end capital punishment in Utah. The bill failed without enough support.

Utah’s most recent execution — its first in 14 years — happened in 2024, when Taberon Honie was put to death by lethal injection. There are currently three inmates on Utah’s death row after the Utah Supreme Court granted Douglas Stewart Carter a new trial last year, taking him out of line, after they found “intentional misconduct” by two police officers and a prosecutor 40 years earlier.

Source: utahnewsdispatch.com, Annie Knox, February 26, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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