Utah to execute man with dementia; as dementia educator, I’m horrified

Photo: Bermix Studio via unsplash.com/@bermixstudio

Reading about Ralph Leroy Menzies, the 67-year-old man with dementia who is set to be executed by firing squad in Utah, deeply upsets me.

Read: https://abc7chicago.com/post/utah-judge-schedules-execution-firing-squad-man-dementia/17055572/

This troubles me as someone who has never lived with the death penalty, as a person of faith, and as someone who works every day with people who have dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

I grew up in Hawaii, a state that got rid of the death penalty before it even became a state. In my community, the worst crimes were punished with life in prison without parole.

We saw justice not as getting revenge, but as protecting society and recognizing that human life has value. Even the lives of people who did terrible things.

When I later moved to a state where a Republican governor stopped all executions, I felt relieved that my new home, Illinois, shared the same beliefs about how precious life is.

The case of Mr. Menzies makes me face something that goes against both my work experience and my deepest beliefs.

As someone who teaches healthcare workers about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, I know exactly what this diagnosis means.

When Judge Matthew Bates said that Menzies “consistently and rationally” understands why he faces execution even though his mind is getting worse, I wonder if the judge really understands what dementia does to a person’s brain.

Mr. Menzies now uses a wheelchair and needs oxygen to breathe. His lawyers say he can’t understand his legal case.

The man who committed that horrible crime against Maurine Hunsaker in 1986—a crime that was truly awful and deserved serious punishment—that man’s ability to think no longer exists in any real way.

What’s left is just a shell, a person whose brain has been destroyed by disease, whose memories have been taken away, whose ability to understand right and wrong has been completely changed.

In my work with people with dementia, I see every day how this disease changes people completely.

The parts of the brain that help people make decisions, understand right and wrong, and see what happens when they do something literally shrink and die.

I even got to hold, in my own two hands, a slice of a human brain with dementia during my train-the-trainer education at Rush Medical Center in Chicago.

The person who comes out of this brain damage is nothing like who they used to be. In fact, they become a different person.

To execute Mr. Menzies now would be like killing someone who, in the most basic sense, did not commit the crime he’s being punished for.

My faith teaches me that this path is not only wrong medically and morally—it goes against everything I believe about God.

When Jesus faced people who wanted to stone a woman to death, he challenged the crowd, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

He always chose mercy over revenge, love over payback.

The Gospel message that shaped my family’s values for generations calls us to do better than “an eye for an eye.”

We are called to stop the cycle of violence, not keep it going.

The death penalty has always struck me as barbarous precisely because it reduces us to the level of those who kill.

But executing someone with dementia goes beyond barbarism. It enters the realm of profound cruelty.

Mr. Menzies, according to all medical evidence, cannot understand why he is facing death. The courts have not agreed because they are blind to the actual science of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

As the Supreme Court has recognized in previous cases, executing someone who cannot comprehend their punishment serves no purpose of justice or deterrence.

It becomes nothing more than state-sanctioned vengeance against a man who, cognitively speaking, is no longer the person who committed the crime.

I think of the families I work with, watching their loved ones disappear piece by piece to this terrible disease.

I think of my patients, confused and frightened, unable to understand why familiar people have become strangers, why simple tasks have become impossible.

Would we execute any of them for actions they took before their diagnosis?

The question itself reveals the moral absurdity of Mr. Menzies’ situation.

I do not diminish the grief of Maurine Hunsaker’s family, particularly her son Matt, who has waited thirty-seven years for what he calls justice.

The Hunsaker family’s pain is real and their desire for closure understandable.

But true justice, the kind that honors both victim and perpetrator as human beings created in God’s image, cannot be achieved by killing a man whose mind has been destroyed by disease.

The fact that Utah still uses firing squads feels like a relic from a more barbarous time, and proceeding with this execution would be a stain on our collective conscience.

We are better than this.

Our faith calls us to be better than this.

Our understanding of medicine and human dignity demands that we be better than this.

Justice delayed is indeed justice denied, but justice perverted by executing someone with dementia is no justice at all.

It is simply cruelty dressed in legal robes, and it diminishes us all.