Utah Reaches Ten Years With No Executions

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 a list of 34 states — more than two thirds of the coun­try — that either do not have the death penal­ty or have not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion in at least a decade. Twenty-two states no longer autho­rize cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Twelve of the 28 states (42.9%) that do have the death penal­ty have not exe­cut­ed any­one in at least 10 years. It has been even longer — 12 years — since Utah last imposed a new death sentence. 

The decline of the death penal­ty in Utah is part of a sweep­ing trend away from the death penal­ty in the west­ern United States. In the last two years, Washington and Colorado have abol­ished the death penal­ty, California has imposed a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions and dis­man­tled its exe­cu­tion cham­ber, New Mexico has cleared its death row, and Oregon and Arizona have both nar­rowed the cir­cum­stances in which the death penal­ty may be imposed. 2019 marked the fifth con­sec­u­tive year with no exe­cu­tions west of Texas. The four new death sen­tences imposed in 2019 were the fewest in the West since California rein­stat­ed its death penal­ty in 1977, and fell by half from the pri­or record low set in 2018. Only three coun­ties west of Texas sen­tenced any­one to death in 2019. With this anniver­sary, only two of the eleven states west of Texas — Arizona and Idaho — still have a death penal­ty and have car­ried out an exe­cu­tion with­in the last decade. 

Since 2016, Utah has seen two abo­li­tion efforts led by Republican leg­is­la­tors. State Senator Steve Urquhart, a for­mer death-penal­ty sup­port­er, spon­sored an abo­li­tion bill in 2016. ​“I ask my con­ser­v­a­tive friends what they think gov­ern­ment does extreme­ly well. And then I ask them what they think gov­ern­ment does per­fect­ly. And they usu­al­ly say, ​‘It doesn’t do any­thing per­fect­ly.’ And then I ask, ​‘Yet we’re going to give our­selves the god­like pow­er over life and death?’” He also said that, increas­ing­ly, he has moral qualms about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment: ​“I’m think­ing that it’s wrong for gov­ern­ment to be in busi­ness in killing its own cit­i­zens. That cheapens life.” 

Urquhart’s bill passed the Utah Senate and a House com­mit­tee but did not receive a vote in the full House. In 2018, Representative Gage Froerer spon­sored anoth­er repeal bill, but ulti­mate­ly with­drew it because he believed it would fail on a close vote in the House. ​“I was hope­ful that Utah would be one of the first red states to take this, because the trend obvi­ous­ly is to do away with the death penal­ty,” Froerer said. ​“I’m con­vinced whether it’s next year or five or 10 years from now the death penal­ty will go away.” 

The last exe­cu­tion in Utah, that of Ronnie Gardner on June 18, 2010, was sur­round­ed by con­tro­ver­sy. Family mem­bers of the vic­tim, Michael Burdell, sup­port­ed clemen­cy for Gardner and asked that the exe­cu­tion be halt­ed. ​“Knowing Michael, as I did, he would not want Ronnie Lee to be exe­cut­ed,” Burdell’s for­mer girl­friend, Donna Nu, said at a court hear­ing. ​“Further, he would not want to be the rea­son Ronnie Lee is exe­cut­ed.” Religious lead­ers from a vari­ety of faiths decried Gardner’s execution. 

Utah’s method of exe­cu­tion also attract­ed wide­spread atten­tion, as Gardner became the first per­son in 14 years to be exe­cut­ed by fir­ing squad. Though the state had aban­doned the fir­ing squad as an exe­cu­tion option in 2004, Gardner was still eli­gi­ble to select it because he had been sen­tenced to death before the law was amend­ed. In 2015, Utah re-insti­tut­ed the fir­ing squad as a back-up method of exe­cu­tion in the event that lethal injec­tion was declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al or became unavailable. 

Utah is the only state to have car­ried out exe­cu­tions by fir­ing squad since the rein­state­ment of the death penal­ty in the 1970s. Gardner is the last per­son to have been exe­cut­ed by that method. The state has employed sharp­shoot­ers to exe­cute two oth­er pris­on­ers: Gary Gilmore in 1977, who was the first per­son exe­cut­ed in the U.S. after Gregg v. Georgia allowed exe­cu­tions to resume, and John Taylor in 1996.