On July 24, 1984, Brenda Wright Lafferty and her infant daughter were killed in American Fork, a small city in Utah County about thirty miles south of Salt Lake City. Two of the young mother's brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty, were charged with the murders. Dan Lafferty was convicted in a separate trial in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison. Ron Lafferty, the elder of the two, was convicted by a jury in May 1985 on every count he faced and sentenced to death.
That was the beginning of his case, not the end. For the next thirty-five years the question that ran through every courtroom he entered was whether he was mentally competent to be tried at all. In 1991 a federal appeals court threw out his convictions because the trial judge had measured his competency by the wrong legal standard. Utah tried him again. In April 1996 a second jury found him guilty on all counts, and a second jury sentence of death followed. The Utah Supreme Court affirmed that judgment in 2001, the state courts refused post-conviction relief in 2007, a federal district court denied his habeas petition in 2017, and in August 2019 the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit declined to hear a further appeal. He died on November 11, 2019, in Utah, still under sentence of death, about thirty-four years after he was first condemned.
Ronald Watson Lafferty grew up in Orem, in Utah County, and was raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He grew steadily more critical of the church during 1982 and 1983, and in 1983 he was excommunicated. He regarded the excommunication as unjust.
In the same period Lafferty and several of his brothers organized themselves into a group he called the School of the Prophets. The brothers claimed to receive communications from God and met as a group to discuss them. In the spring of 1984 he told the group of a claimed revelation that, the courts later found, singled out four people, among them his sister-in-law and her daughter.
When Lafferty took a later claimed revelation to the group in March 1984, only two of his brothers agreed to act on it. The others decided that it did not come from God and withdrew. The School of the Prophets broke up over that disagreement, but Ron and Dan Lafferty held to the belief that the revelations had to be carried out.
Prosecutors later put the motive in plainer terms. They told the jury that she had opposed the brothers' efforts to draw her husband into a polygamous group, and that she had kept up friendships with the brothers' former wives.
The young mother lived in American Fork with her husband, one of Ron Lafferty's younger brothers, and their baby daughter. Her husband was the first witness the State called when the case was tried for the second time, in March 1996. Prosecutors described her as a woman who had resisted the brothers' religious recruiting of her husband and who had stood by the women the brothers had divorced. That stance is the thread the State drew through every stage of the case: in its telling, her refusal to go along was the reason she was singled out.
The judgments that followed concerned themselves almost entirely with the man accused of her murder. She and her daughter were the only people who died. The two others named in the claimed revelation were never harmed.
The young mother and her daughter were killed in American Fork on July 24, 1984. Two other men had traveled there with the brothers. Plans to go on to the other two people named in the claimed revelation came to nothing, and the brothers abandoned them that same day.
One of the two men who had been with the brothers testified at trial that, on the drive away, Ron Lafferty admitted killing his sister-in-law. That testimony carried great weight later. When the Utah Supreme Court reviewed his second death sentence in 2001, it pointed to the same witness and to the jury's finding that Ron Lafferty was guilty as a perpetrator of the killings, not as an accomplice.
Another of the Lafferty brothers went to the police after the deaths, and the American Fork Police Department investigated the case alongside Utah County authorities. The two men who had traveled with the brothers left them the following night. They were arrested in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on July 30, 1984, six days after the killings.
The brothers stayed at large for nearly three more weeks. On August 17, 1984, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation took Ron and Dan Lafferty into custody in Reno, Nevada, and they were returned to Utah to face charges in Utah County.
The Utah County Attorney's Office charged Ron Lafferty in the state district court with two counts of first degree murder, two counts of aggravated burglary and two counts of conspiracy to commit first degree murder. The two murder counts, capital felonies, concerned the mother and her daughter. One aggravated burglary count concerned the American Fork property where they died and the other concerned the property of the woman named in the claimed revelation. The two conspiracy counts concerned that woman and the man named alongside her. Dan Lafferty faced the same case and was tried separately.
Competency became the central issue almost at once. Two evaluations in 1984 found both brothers competent to stand trial. After an incident in jail while he awaited trial, the trial court found Ron Lafferty incompetent and sent him to the state hospital for treatment. At a later hearing, the fourth on the question, he was found competent and the case went forward.
The judge ruled at an April 1985 pretrial hearing that he was competent. That ruling rested on the common-law test of whether a defendant can understand the proceedings and assist his lawyer. Six years later the federal appeals court would hold that this was not enough.
Dan Lafferty was tried first. A jury convicted him on all four counts he faced and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Ron Lafferty's trial in the Fourth District Court for Utah County ran from April 25 to May 7, 1985. The jury found him guilty on all counts and returned sentences of death on the two capital homicides. In 1988 the Utah Supreme Court affirmed his convictions and sentence.
Utah law at the time allowed a condemned man a choice of the method of his execution, and he made that choice at sentencing. Decades later his lawyers would argue that he had not been legally competent to make it.
Lafferty turned next to the federal courts with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The United States District Court for the District of Utah denied it in November 1989, and he appealed. On February 12, 1990, the Tenth Circuit stayed his execution pending its decision.
The decision came on December 9, 1991. A divided three-judge panel granted the writ. The majority held that the Utah trial judge had applied the wrong standard when he found Lafferty competent. Under Dusky v. United States, a 1960 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, a defendant must have a rational as well as a factual understanding of the proceedings against him. The majority treated sufficient contact with reality as the core of that rational understanding: a defendant lacks it, the court wrote, if his mental condition keeps him from perceiving accurately the world around him. The Utah judge had treated factual understanding as enough.
The panel did not hold that Lafferty was incompetent as a matter of law. It held that the pretrial record could not support a finding of competency under the proper standard, and that the passage of time, about six years, had made it impractical to send the case back for an after-the-fact hearing. The convictions and the death sentence were vacated, and the State of Utah was left free to try him again. If he raised competency a second time, it would have to be judged under Dusky.
One judge dissented. In his view the Utah court had applied the correct test, the majority had put its own judgment in place of the trial judge's, and federal law required deference to the state court's finding on a review of the whole record, including the judge's own observations of Lafferty at trial. The panel denied rehearing on January 3, 1992.
The judgment was entered on December 10, 1991. The appeals court sent its opinion and judgment to the district court on May 26, 1992, as its mandate, and the district court filed them on June 1, 1992. In July 1992 Utah began the process of retrying him, and the federal court released the state court records back to the trial court for that purpose.
At the time the ruling came down, the Utah County Attorney was weighing a request for U.S. Supreme Court review against a new prosecution, and warned county commissioners of the cost of a second trial. The county commission said the money would be found. The prosecution chose to try him again.
The State charged Lafferty anew with two counts each of first degree felony criminal homicide, first degree aggravated burglary and second degree conspiracy to commit criminal homicide. The case went to a different judge from the one who had presided in 1985.
A competency hearing was held in November 1992. After testimony from three doctors, the court found Lafferty not competent to stand trial because of mental illness, and he was returned to the state hospital for treatment. At a second hearing in February 1994, after testimony from two doctors, the court found him competent.
The retrial still did not begin for two more years. It was delayed by defense motions and by the disqualification of the Utah County Attorney's Office from the case.
Jury selection began in February 1996. In the early days of the trial Lafferty was removed from the courtroom several times for verbal and physical outbursts. The State asked the court to decide whether another competency hearing was needed, and two experts who interviewed him reached opposite conclusions. The judge ordered a full hearing and asked the eight experts who had examined Lafferty before, four retained by the State and four by the defense, to examine him again.
The hearing took place on March 8 and 14, 1996. All four State experts found him competent. Three of the defense experts found him mentally ill and not competent, and the fourth said more observation was needed. The judge weighed each opinion in a sixteen-page memorandum decision and found Lafferty competent. In the court's findings he was not delusional and did not then suffer from a mental illness that would keep him from taking a rational part in his defense; his religious and political ideas, however unusual his labels for them, had been formed through a rationally explained process from his real experiences. The judge recorded that in the competency hearings he had been calm, polite and cooperative and had responded appropriately to what happened around him.
The second trial, again in the Fourth District Court, opened with statements and testimony on March 25, 1996. Eight men and seven women were seated, three of them alternates whose identities were held back until the testimony ended. The courthouse had a room beside the courtroom with a closed-circuit television feed, prepared in case Lafferty had to be removed again. On the opening day he sat calmly, took notes and conferred with his lawyers.
The State called the victim's husband first. Former neighbors, a police officer from American Fork, a former member of the brothers' study group and another Lafferty brother followed. Dan Lafferty, already serving his life sentence, was not on trial.
The guilt phase ran until April 10, 1996. The jury found Ron Lafferty guilty on all counts. In the penalty phase that followed, the defense put forward a case for his life. His lead trial lawyer showed that he had no significant history of prior criminal activity. She argued that he had been an accomplice and that his part had been relatively minor, and she asked the jury to weigh the life sentence his brother had received. She argued that mental illness had impaired his capacity at the time of the killings to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform it to the law, and that his continuing mental illness should lessen his punishment. The judge told the jury that it could consider the mental health evidence it had heard in the guilt phase.
The State, for its part, played the jury clips of press conferences in which Lafferty had spoken, offered to show his lack of remorse, and introduced a videotape made during the investigation. In April 1996 the jury unanimously returned a sentence of death on each of the two capital homicide counts.
Lafferty appealed directly to the Utah Supreme Court, and on February 23, 2001, the court affirmed, in an opinion by the Chief Justice in which the other four justices concurred.
On competency, the court held that the experts had met the statute's requirements. The 1996 hearing had been held fewer than five days after the experts' reports, a technical violation that caused no harm; reports missing some statutory factors were likewise harmless; and interviews satisfied the requirement of an examination. The finding that Lafferty was competent was not clearly erroneous, and the trial court had been right to deny a new trial because no bona fide doubt about competency arose. The court held that the trial judge had correctly applied Dusky, as the Tenth Circuit had restated it, and had carefully considered each of the eight experts.
The court upheld the removal for cause of a prospective juror who could not impose death in nearly any circumstances. It held that Lafferty lacked standing to challenge Utah's statute on the insanity defense and mental illness because he had never been found mentally ill at the relevant times or legally insane and the evidence pointed the other way. The videotape was not victim impact evidence and had been properly admitted, and the prosecutor's rebuttal remarks were neither victim impact evidence nor prejudicial. The press-conference clips were proper, since lack of remorse may be considered, and they were neither too remote in time nor unfairly prejudicial. The trial judge had been right to refuse a requested mercy instruction.
The court found the death sentence proportionate. The jury had found him guilty as a perpetrator, and Utah's case law upheld death sentences even for a single first degree murder. It declined to compare his sentence with his brother's, holding that case-by-case proportionality review is not constitutionally required. It rejected challenges to the death penalty statute on burden of proof, meaningful review and overbreadth, and rejected the argument that fourteen years on death row made the sentence unconstitutional.
On double jeopardy, the court held that "double jeopardy does not generally bar a second trial when a conviction was successfully vacated." The 1991 ruling had rested on trial error, the wrong competency standard, and not on any lack of evidence. Lafferty also argued that the prosecution at the first trial had disclosed one doctor's opinion that he was competent while withholding another doctor's contrary opinion. The court treated that as trial error that the new trial had cured, not a bar to trying him again. The disposition read: "We affirm defendant's conviction and sentence."
Lafferty then sought post-conviction relief in the state courts. The trial court granted summary judgment for the State, and on September 14, 2007, the Utah Supreme Court affirmed in Lafferty v. State.
His central claim was that new evidence showed he had not been competent to stand trial in 1985. It rested on a forensic psychologist who had earlier found Lafferty competent and had since found another Utah defendant incompetent. The justices held that "the newly discovered evidence does not dictate a different competency determination," noting that three other experts had found Lafferty competent. They rejected his claims that his trial lawyers had a conflict of interest and gave him ineffective assistance. On the claim that counsel had failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence about his family history, his mental health and his past use of chemical substances, the court held that he had not shown how any shortcoming caused him prejudice, and that he had pointed to no undiscovered evidence that a fuller investigation would have produced.
On September 28, 2007, Lafferty petitioned for rehearing and raised a new argument: that the Tenth Circuit's 1990 stay had never lapsed, so the state court had lacked jurisdiction to retry him at all. The Utah Supreme Court denied the petition without discussion.
In May 2007 Lafferty filed a second federal habeas petition in the District of Utah. He amended it twice, and it grew to thirty-five claims. In December 2009 his lawyers asked the federal court for a third competency hearing, saying they could not communicate with him in any meaningful way about his case and asking that the federal proceedings be paused until his competency was restored. State lawyers answered that his competency had no bearing on the federal case and that no stay was required.
The litigation moved slowly. On October 30, 2015, the federal district judge refused to halt the case so that Lafferty could pursue complaints in state court about evidence handling and testimony, though he left him free to raise them there. In the same ruling the judge rejected his claim that the method of execution he had chosen would be cruel and unusual punishment, observing that the U.S. Supreme Court had never struck down a state's chosen method on that ground.
On October 5, 2016, the judge denied his requests to gather new evidence for claims that his case had been tainted by a sentencing videotape, by the errors of earlier lawyers and by jury bias. The judge ruled that the lawyers had waited nearly a decade to raise the claims and that new evidence might serve no purpose.
On October 5, 2017, the district court denied the petition. It sided with the State's experts on his fitness for trial and weighed the argument that his death sentence was out of line with his brother's life sentence. Lafferty moved to alter or amend the judgment, focusing on one claim that his appellate lawyers had been ineffective. The court denied the motion and declined to grant a certificate of appealability on any claim.
Lafferty asked the Tenth Circuit for a certificate of appealability on four claims. On August 12, 2019, a three-judge panel denied it and dismissed the matter, holding that he had not shown that reasonable jurists could differ over how any of the four claims should have been resolved.
On the first claim, jurisdiction, the panel held that nothing in the Supreme Court's precedent required the district court to enter a particular order after the 1991 reversal, and it rejected the argument that the 1990 stay had remained in force through the retrial. The stay, it held, expired on its own terms when the court issued its opinion and judgment in 1991.
On the second claim, double jeopardy, the panel held that its 1991 ruling had not found the evidence at the first trial legally insufficient. The ruling had rested only on the trial error of the wrong competency standard. Even if that error had kept his first lawyers from presenting evidence of mental illness or a manslaughter strategy, it did not change the nature of the 1991 holding.
On the third, ineffective assistance at trial and sentencing, the panel agreed with the district court that he had identified no specific evidence that his lawyers should have found and presented. It rejected as incorrect his assertion that the mitigation case had been a simple plea for mercy, setting out the arguments his lead counsel had in fact made. It also denied a separate certificate on his requests to depose his trial lawyer and to expand the record.
On the fourth, the competency finding, the panel quoted the Utah Supreme Court's account of the 1996 hearing at length and concluded that no reasonable jurist could debate the district court's ruling that the state court had properly applied Dusky and weighed the eight experts with care.
A lawyer for the Utah Attorney General's Office said the ruling effectively ended his federal habeas case, apart from remaining motions. His last avenue was a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, which the State expected to fail. The attorney general's office said it would seek a warrant of execution despite his age and expected an execution in 2020.
Ron Lafferty died on November 11, 2019, in Utah, while still under sentence of death. No execution date had been set. He had spent about thirty-four years on death row, among the longest-serving condemned inmates in the country. His brother Dan Lafferty had been convicted in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison.
Two strands of law shaped the case. The first was the federal constitutional standard for competency to stand trial. Dusky v. United States requires that a defendant have both a rational and a factual understanding of the proceedings and enough present ability to consult his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding. The 1985 trial judge's reliance on the older common-law formula of understanding the proceedings and assisting counsel was the reason the first judgment fell. Every later court that reviewed the 1996 finding, the Utah Supreme Court in 2001 and 2007, the federal district court in 2017 and the Tenth Circuit in 2019, examined whether Dusky had been applied correctly the second time, and each held that it had.
The second strand was Utah's law on the method of execution. When Lafferty was first sentenced, a condemned prisoner in Utah could choose between two methods, and lethal injection was the default. In 2004 Utah removed the method Lafferty had chosen as an option for future sentences, without applying the change to prisoners who had already chosen it. In 2015 the legislature restored that method as a backup for use only if lethal injection drugs were unavailable. His original choice therefore remained the method that applied to his sentence, and it was the basis of the federal challenge rejected in 2015.
Lafferty's competency remained in dispute for the whole of the case. The 1985 trial court found him competent under the wrong standard. The 1992 court found him incompetent, the 1994 court found him competent, and the 1996 hearing split the experts four to three, with one undecided, along the lines of the parties who retained them. His lawyers continued to argue in 2009 that they could not communicate with him meaningfully about his case. The courts' final word was that the 1996 finding of competency was supported by the evidence and was reached under the correct legal test.
The respective roles of the two brothers were argued at every stage. The defense told the 1996 jury that Ron Lafferty had been an accomplice whose part was relatively minor. The jury found him guilty as a perpetrator, relying in part on the testimony of the man who said Lafferty had admitted his part on the drive away, and the Utah Supreme Court upheld the sentence on that basis. The difference between his death sentence and his brother's life sentence was raised on direct appeal and again in federal court; neither court accepted it as a ground for relief.
At the first trial the prosecution disclosed one doctor's opinion that Lafferty was competent and did not disclose another doctor's contrary opinion. The Utah Supreme Court treated the withholding as an error cured by the new trial rather than a bar to it.
1983: Ron Lafferty is excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
March 1984: He takes a further claimed revelation to his brothers' study group; the group breaks up over it.
July 24, 1984: His sister-in-law and her infant daughter are killed in American Fork, Utah.
July 30, 1984: Two men who had been with the brothers are arrested in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
August 17, 1984: The FBI takes Ron and Dan Lafferty into custody in Reno, Nevada.
1985: Dan Lafferty is convicted in a separate trial and sentenced to life in prison.
April 25 to May 7, 1985: Ron Lafferty is tried in the Fourth District Court, found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death on both capital counts.
1988: The Utah Supreme Court affirms the convictions and sentence.
November 1989: The federal district court denies his first habeas petition.
February 12, 1990: The Tenth Circuit stays his execution pending appeal.
December 9, 1991: Lafferty v. Cook: the Tenth Circuit grants the writ and vacates the convictions and sentence.
January 3, 1992: Rehearing denied.
June 1, 1992: The federal mandate is filed; in July Utah begins the retrial process.
November 1992: The state court finds him not competent to stand trial.
February 1994: The state court finds him competent.
March 8 and 14, 1996: A further competency hearing with eight experts; he is found competent.
March 25 to April 10, 1996: Retrial; guilty on all counts.
April 1996: The jury returns death sentences on both capital homicide counts.
February 23, 2001: The Utah Supreme Court affirms the conviction and sentence.
May 2007: He files a second federal habeas petition.
September 14, 2007: The Utah Supreme Court affirms the denial of post-conviction relief.
September 28, 2007: He seeks rehearing on a jurisdiction claim; the petition is denied without discussion.
December 2009: His lawyers ask the federal court for a third competency hearing.
October 30, 2015: The federal judge rejects his method-of-execution claim.
October 5, 2016: The federal judge denies requests to gather new evidence.
October 5, 2017: The federal district court denies habeas relief.
August 12, 2019: The Tenth Circuit denies a certificate of appealability and dismisses the matter.
November 11, 2019: Ron Lafferty dies in Utah while under sentence of death.