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.

The defense presented testimony that Honie’s childhood was infused with multigenerational trauma in part from his parents and others on the Hopi Indian Reservation where he grew up being taken away from their homes and put in government boarding schools. Both his parents had “very severe alcohol problems” and fought in front of their children in their two-room home, with his mother threatening to shoot herself with a gun during one fight, Victoria Reynolds, a clinical psychologist and expert in psychological trauma, said.

Honie, who was exposed to alcohol in his mother’s womb, began drinking regularly when he was around 12, as his brain was still developing, and also used other drugs like marijuana and cocaine, she said.

“These outcomes are larger than just Mr. Honie,” she said.

Honie’s lawyers say a traumatic and violent childhood coupled with his longtime 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.”

Attorneys for the state said that characterization failed to capture the brutality of the attack, and the fact that Honie had said hours before it occurred that he intended to kill Benn.

Honie’s lawyers blame poor legal advice for allowing Honie 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, smashed a glass door to enter Benn’s house while she was home with her grandchildren then severely beat and slashed her, 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.