Death by injection gurney.

Menzies v. Utah Department of Corrections

Location: Utah
Court Type: Utah Supreme Court
Status: Ongoing
Last Update: January 30, 2025

What's at Stake

Article I, section 9 of the Utah Constitution protects incarcerated individuals from both cruel and unusual punishment and unnecessarily rigorous treatment. This case asks whether death-sentenced plaintiffs seeking to challenge certain execution methods as cruel and unusual or unnecessarily rigorous under this provision must identify, in their pleadings, an alternative method of execution. The U.S. Supreme Court has required this alternative for Eighth Amendment challenges, but the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the Capital Punishment Project and ACLU of Utah, filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, arguing that federal caselaw does not limit the greater protections provided by section 9 of the Utah Constitution. Forcing prisoners challenging a method of execution to identify an acceptable alternative method is cruel, coercive, and not necessary to the administration of Utah’s death penalty laws.

The plaintiffs, a group of individuals sentenced to death in Utah, brought suit against the Department of Corrections and various state officials, challenging Utah’s current execution protocols for lethal injection and firing squad as unconstitutional under article I, section 9 of the Utah Constitution. Section 9 contains both a cruel and unusual punishments provision and a clause forbidding the treatment of any individual in the carceral system with “unnecessary rigor.”

In addressing the claims, the district court followed Glossip v. Gross, an Eighth Amendment case in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that an individual challenging a method of execution as cruel and unusual must, among other things, point to an alternative method of execution available. Because the plaintiffs had not pointed to an alternative and available method of execution, the district court dismissed the state constitutional claim under article I, section 9. The dismissal is now on appeal to the Utah Supreme Court.

SSCI, alongside the ACLU of Utah and the Capital Punishment Project, filed an amicus brief arguing that in addressing plaintiffs’ claims, the district court did not consider the unique nature of Utah’s Constitution and how it might apply to a method-of-execution challenge. Our brief argues that article I, section 9 of the Utah Constitution sweeps more broadly than the Eighth Amendment and that the section’s unnecessary rigor clause, standing alone or considered in conjunction with the cruel and unusual punishment clause, bars imposing any cruelty or harshness that is not strictly necessary or essential to the State’s penological goal. We explain that the district court’s requirement that death-sentenced prisoners point to an alternative method of execution to challenge the existing methods conflicts with and violates that constitutional guarantee. Such a requirement is not only unnecessary to the operation of the justice system, but also useless under Utah law and practice.

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