SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Attorney General's Office has filed a death warrant to have a death row inmate executed.
The warrant, filed late Wednesday in Salt Lake City's 3rd District Court, seeks to set a date to execute Ralph Leroy Menzies, who was sentenced to death for the 1986 kidnapping and murder of Maurine Hunsaker. The U.S. Supreme Court previously rejected his last appeal.
FOX 13 News first reported in October that Menzies had exhausted his appeals. But it does not mean execution is imminent. The court docket late Wednesday did not indicate if Judge Matthew Bates had signed the warrant or scheduled a hearing on it.
Menzies can seek to have his sentence commuted by the Board of Pardons & Parole.
Menzies is still part of litigation filed by a group of death row inmates challenging Utah's death penalty statutes and methods of execution, lethal injection and firing squad. A judge rejected the lawsuit, but the inmates filed a new motion to revive it.
Under Utah law, lethal injection is the primary method of execution. If that is not available (and the Department of Corrections has said in the past it doesn't have the chemicals necessary to carry out such an execution) then firing squad becomes the primary method.
