The Utah Supreme Court has blocked a death row inmate's upcoming execution, after the inmate's attorneys argued in an extensive legal back-and-forth with the state that their client's worsening dementia should spare him from capital punishment.

Ralph Leroy Menzies , 67, was set to be executed Sept. 5 for abducting and killing Utah mother of three Maurine Hunsaker. Hunsaker was abducted from a store on Feb. 23, 1986, and later called her husband to say she had been robbed and kidnapped but would be released by her abductor that night. Two days later, a hiker found her body at a picnic area about 16 miles away in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Hunsaker had been strangled, her throat slashed.

When given a choice decades ago, Menzies selected a firing squad as his method of execution. He would

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