State And Federal Info
Ronnie Lee Gardner became the third person in the modern era to be executed by firing squad on June 18, 2010. It has not executed anyone since.
On July 24, 1984, a state holiday commemorating the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley, Ronald Lafferty and his brother Dan murdered his sister-in-law Brenda and her baby daughter, delusionally believing that they had been responsible for his excommunication from the Church of Latter Day Saints. Lafferty, who was severely mentally ill, and his brothers had formed a breakaway polygamous sect they called the School of the Prophets. He said he had received a “divinely inspired” vision to commit the killings. Lafferty was sentenced to death in 1985, but a federal appeals court overturned his conviction because of his concerns over his mental competency. His retrial was delayed after a court found him incompetent to stand trial in 1992. Two years later, he was deemed competent to be retried. He was retried and convicted in April 1996 and again sentenced to death.
Lafferty died on Utah’s death row in November 2019 at the age of 78. At the time, he was Utah’s longest-serving death-row prisoner. Lafferty’s case was the subject of Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book, Under the Banner of Heaven.
Utah was the first state to resume executions after capital punishment was reinstated in the United States in 1976, when Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1977.
Utah is the only state to have executed inmates by firing squad in the modern era.
Costs
Oct 14, 2020
A federal district court judge has issued an order moving closer to trial a lawsuit filed against a Utah county for the alleged retaliatory firing of a lawyer who had publicly criticized the county for refusing to adequately fund …
Recent Legislative Activity
Jun 18, 2020
Utah has become the latest U.S. state to have gone more than a decade without carrying out an execution. The state last put a prisoner to death on June 18, 2010, when it executed Ronnie Gardner by firing squad. Utah joins…
Representation
Mar 10, 2020
NEWS (3/10/20): A Utah federal district court has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner
Innocence
Mar 08, 2020
NEWS (3/13) — North Carolina: The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission voted 5 – 3 to empanel a three-judge review committee to determine whether four men c…
Crimes Punishable by Death
Dec 23, 2019
In a year of declining death-penalty usage across the United States, nowhere was the erosion of capital punishment as sustained and pronounced in 2019 as it was in the western United States. Continuing a wave of momentum from
Recent Legislative Activity
Oct 29, 2019
More than 250 conservative leaders from across the country have signed on to a statement expressing their opposition to capital punishment as administered across the United States and issued a “call [to] our fellow conservatives to reexamine the d…
Costs
Aug 14, 2019
The high cost of meeting its obligation to provide constitutionally-mandated effective representation for indigent defendants in capital cases continues to generate controversy in Utah’s fourth largest county. With two capital tri…
Arbitrariness
Aug 12, 2019
NEWS — August 15: Tennessee has executed Stephen Michael West after Governor Bill Lee denied his petition for clemency. West was the eleventh person executed in the United States in 2019 and the second in Tennessee.…
Apr 04, 2019
Citing “damning revelations” that police and prosecutors have used bribes and threats to secure testimony in a three-decades-old capital case, the Utah Supreme Court has ordered a Utah County court to conduct a hearing to determin…
Mental Illness
Apr 04, 2018
A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called “sneaky” and “deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,…
