A man on death row for a 1998 murder asks Utah’s parole board for mercy

Utah officials began hearing testimony Monday about whether a man facing execution next month should be spared the death penalty for murdering his girlfriend’s mother and instead remain imprisoned for life.

The parole board hearing comes after state officials said Saturday that they no longer plan to use an untested combination of execution drugs that Taberon Dave Honie’s lawyers said could cause “excruciating pain.” They will use a single different drug instead — pentobarbital — which has been used by other states and in federal executions.

The scheduled Aug. 8 execution would be Utah’s first since Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by firing squad in 2010, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Honie, members of his family and representatives of the victim, 49-year-old Claudia Benn, were expected to testify in the two-day hearing. Utah Board of Pardons & Parole Chairman Scott Stephenson said a decision would be made “as soon as practical” following the proceedings.

Honie’s lawyers said a traumatic and violent childhood coupled with his long-time drug abuse, a previous brain injury and extreme intoxication fueled his behavior when he broke into his girlfriend’s mother’s house and killed her following what Honie’s lawyers called “a domestic dispute.”

They blamed poor legal advice for allowing Honie — a native of Arizona’s Hopi Indian Reservation — to be sentenced by a judge instead of a jury that might have been more sympathetic and spared him the death penalty.

“Mr. Honie has always expressed genuine remorse and sadness … from the moment he was arrested,” they wrote in his commutation petition. Honie has a grown daughter and is “worthy of mercy,” it said.

Attorneys for the state urged the board to reject the request for a lesser sentence.

They said the judge who sentenced Honie already considered his remorse, his difficult upbringing and his state of intoxication when he killed Benn. Honie, then 22 years old, smashed a glass door to enter Benn’s house while she was home with her grandchildren then severely beat her and slashed her in the throat, in the vagina and around her anus, according to court documents.

Police arrived at the home to find him covered in blood, the documents said.

“Honie says the board should show him mercy because he has taken responsibility for killing Claudia,” the state’s lawyers wrote. “The commutation petition itself is a long deflection of responsibility that never once acknowledges any of the savage acts he inflicted on Claudia or her granddaughters.”

Honie was convicted in 1999 of aggravated murder.

After decades of failed appeals, Honie’s execution warrant was signed last month despite defense objections to the planned lethal drug combination of the sedative ketamine, the anesthetic fentanyl and potassium chloride to stop his heart. Honie’s attorneys sued, and corrections officials agreed to switch to pentobarbital.

There’s been evidence that pentobarbital can also cause extreme pain, including in federal executions carried out in the last months of Donald Trump’s presidency.