Ralph Leroy Menzies, who has been on Utah’s death row for 35 years , has an unusual attitude toward the penalty that awaits him. One the one hand he says that if the state is going to execute him it must use the firing squad . On the other, he contends that execution by that method would constitute cruel and unusual punishment and violate Utah’s Constitution. As the state attorney general’s office notes , Menzies was “convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death for the brutal murder of Maurine Hunsaker, a young mother of three who worked as a Kearns convenience store cashier.” Two years earlier, it alleges that Menzies “kidnapped Hunsaker from her job and took her to Big Cottonwood Canyon…. Her body was found two days later, tied to a tree with her throat slashed.”
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment