Ron Lafferty's 1996 death sentencing

Ron Lafferty’s 1996 death sentencing followed a retrial that again found him guilty of first-degree murder and related charges for his role in the killings of Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. At the May 31 hearing, the court converted that verdict into a death sentence and required Lafferty to choose between execution by firing squad and lethal injection. He said that he wanted to live, but, when asked to select a method, chose the firing squad. The sentencing made the state’s judgment explicit; it did not end the case, which continued through appeals for years afterward.

The verdict behind the sentence

The sentencing hearing came after a four-week trial and a five-hour jury deliberation. On April 10, the jury found Lafferty guilty of first-degree murder and related charges, reaching the same result as the jury at his first trial eleven years earlier. The renewed verdict supplied the immediate legal basis for the sentence imposed seven weeks later.

The case had also required jurors to consider how Lafferty’s religious conviction related to his responsibility. The state urged them to see him as narcissistic and devoutly religious, rather than mentally ill, and to hold him accountable for his role in the murders. Its argument asked the jury to distinguish prophetic self-importance and religious devotion from insanity. The verdict resolved that question for the purpose of conviction: the jury found him guilty once more. The sentencing hearing then addressed the consequence, rather than reopening the trial’s central dispute.

The account of the killings had itself been contested. During the drive west after the murders, Chip Carnes recalled Ron describing his own part in the attack, while Dan Lafferty maintained that he, not Ron, had wielded the knife against Brenda. Dan did not dispute the essential account that Ron had handed him the knife and that Dan had killed Erica, but he rejected Carnes’s version of Ron’s actions. Carnes, who faced the possibility of a capital charge and was offered a deal for evidence useful to the prosecution, testified against both brothers. The book treats the brothers as equally culpable, while recording the disagreement over who performed particular acts. By the time of sentencing, the jury’s verdict—not a settled agreement among witnesses about every detail—was the basis for the court’s judgment.

The hearing and the choice of method

Before imposing sentence, Judge Steven Hansen asked Lafferty whether he wanted to speak. Lafferty responded with several minutes of insults directed at the judge. When Hansen checked whether he had finished, Lafferty indicated that he had said what he intended to say. The exchange placed the court’s formal procedure beside Lafferty’s openly contemptuous address, but it did not alter the outcome.

Hansen then pronounced the death sentence and asked Lafferty whether he preferred a firing squad or lethal injection. Lafferty answered that he preferred to live. The judge explained that without a choice he would impose lethal injection. Lafferty then selected the firing squad, invoking his experience of Mormonism as a kind of injection and saying he wanted to try something different. The exchange was not a choice between life and death: the sentence had already been imposed. It was a choice between the methods the court offered, made after Lafferty had plainly stated that neither was what he wanted.

Hansen accepted the selection and sentenced Lafferty to be shot for the crimes. The account draws attention to the collision between religious language and the state’s machinery of punishment. Lafferty’s comparison of Mormonism to an injection made the hearing’s final choice more than a procedural detail in the narrative, without changing its legal meaning: the court had condemned him to death, and he had named the method.

Appeals and the sentence’s afterlife

The sentence did not lead directly to execution. Attorney Mike Esplin filed a series of appeals, taking the case as far as the U.S. Supreme Court. In November 2001, the Court declined to hear Lafferty’s appeal, a decision that the book describes as leaving the sentence virtually assured. Ron Yengich replaced Esplin as defense counsel in September 2002. Further review remained possible, and the account says execution would wait while Yengich pursued avenues for reversal; it anticipated that the sentence might be carried out as early as 2004. It does not report that an execution occurred.

Dan Lafferty regarded his brother’s expected execution through a religious framework rather than simply as a legal outcome. In November 2002, he said he saw little realistic chance that Ron would escape the death penalty and understood the execution as part of God’s design for humankind. He also interpreted it as a possible sign that Armageddon was near, describing it as evidence that the Big Party was approaching. His view turned the anticipated punishment into a forecast of sacred history, in sharp contrast with the court’s concrete sentence and the years of legal procedure still intervening.

The episode therefore has two endings that do not coincide. The judge’s ruling ended the sentencing hearing with a death sentence and a selected method; the appeals process kept that judgment under challenge, while Dan’s interpretation placed its possible execution inside an approaching apocalyptic future. The distinction matters: the book records the sentence and the subsequent legal developments, not a completed execution.