Execution is not closure

Death row inmate Taberon Honie leaves for a recess during the Utah Board of Pardons commutation hearing Tuesday, July 23, 2024, at the Utah State Correctional Facility, in Salt Lake City. (Pool photo by Rick Bowmer/AP)

Shortly after midnight on Aug. 8, the state of Utah will execute Taberon Honie , who killed and sexually assaulted his estranged girlfriend’s mother in 1998.

It was a truly heinous crime, the worst of the worst, the kind that qualifies for the death penalty under the laws of many states, including Utah.

The local media coverage has been standard: Honie’s daughter asked that his sentence be commuted, because she relied on her father for support, suggesting that the man she knew was no longer the same as the man who killed her grandmother 25 year earlier. But never mind that.

The victim’s nieces and nephews asked for justice instead.

“He deserves an eye for an eye,” one told the Associated Press.

“I’ve been waiting for this day for a while now, because I deserve my aunt getting the justice that she needed,” another said. “It’s like a chapter ended, like my aunt is resting good now.”

Yet another, a reporter assumed, “could finally focus on healing.”

I hope so, but I doubt it.

I’ve covered capital murder cases and executions for more than 20 years, mostly as a reporter in Arizona. I am not theoretically opposed to the death penalty. There have been cases I’ve covered where I felt it was justified and should be carried out quickly. But given the random imposition of the death penalty, the cost in trying it, the numbers of exonerations, the difficulties in actually carrying it out, it is totally impractical.

And closure? I don’t believe there is ever closure.

I’ve witnessed five executions, and I’ve heard the same things with every case:

What about justice? What about the victims? What about closure?

Sometimes the questions come from family members; more frequently from politicians who get elected because they are tough on crime.

On June 5, it was Arizona’s Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, talking on Facebook about an unprecedented and probably illegal bid to bypass the Arizona General’s authority to seek a death warrant for Aaron Gunches. Gunches killed a man in 2002, and after 20 years on death row, he asked that his execution be carried out because he was tired of being in prison. Mitchell wanted to make it happen, even if it was not within her jurisdiction to do so.

“Ted Price’s [the victim] family and friends have waited for nearly two decades to see justice and find closure,” she said. “Ted Price’s family has waited long enough.”

Earlier this year, a Washington Post story about a Missouri murderer said:

“Gov. Michael Parson (R) has denied the last-minute attempt to stay the execution of Brian Dorsey, a 52-year-old man convicted in the December 2006 double-murder of his cousin and her husband.

“‘The pain Dorsey brought to others can never be rectified, but carrying out Dorsey’s sentence according to Missouri law and the Court’s order will deliver justice and provide closure,’ Parson said in a news release.”

And on a Salt Lake City TV newscast about the same time, the middle-aged son of a woman whose killer has been on death row for decades talked about how many years he had lived with the thought that his mother was murdered and the killer has so far not been punished.

“There’s no closure,” he said.

That’s right. They were all fooling themselves. Executions don’t bring closure. There is no closure. There is only vengeance.

I recall a case where two teens were having a tug-of-war with a shotgun in a leather case, and it went off and killed one of them. The surviving kid was convicted of manslaughter, whose definition is, basically: You should have realized that your reckless behavior could cause death or injury. The father of the boy who was killed asked the judge to impose the death penalty. Of course, the law wouldn’t allow that as a punishment for manslaughter. He wanted closure, and closure somehow means death.

Never mind that life in prison may be the worse punishment. Robert Comer, who killed a man at an Arizona campground in 1987, like Gunches, asked to speed up his execution. And so did Dale Hausner, an Arizona serial killer found guilty of six murders from 2005 and 2006.

In those two cases, authorities ordered hearings and examinations to prove that Comer and Hausner were of sound mind. Catch 22: It’s unconstitutional to execute a mentally ill person, and if you so badly want to die, you might be mentally ill.

Comer found an attorney to argue his case and was finally executed in 2007. Hausner was not so lucky. His case dragged on, and he even sent me a letter from prison that ended with the plea, “I mean really, what’s a guy got to do to get snuffed out?” He got tired of waiting and died by suicide.

But let’s say the execution takes place. What then?

Richard Stokley was one of two men who raped and killed two 13-year-old girls in southern Arizona. The instigator of the crime, the smarter of the two, pleaded out fast and got 20 years. Stokley went to the death house.

When I first interviewed her, the mother of one of the girls impressed me with her demeanor. She was logical. She spoke calmly about her daughter and the killer and the upcoming execution.

But as the execution grew closer, her facade began to crack. And by the time Stokley was dead, she was beside herself. No closure there. The anticipation had just made the pain worse.

The other killer, by the way, had been out of prison for years. When I reached him on the phone, he said he couldn’t care less about his former co-defendant.

Dan Cook was also sold out by his partner in crime. They worked in a restaurant in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and one day in 1987, they robbed a third fellow roommate, then sexually abused and tortured him before killing him. When a fourth coworker, a teenager, stopped by, they showed him the body — before they killed him too.

I witnessed Cook’s execution. He whimpered and sobbed as the warden read the death warrant. They shut off his microphone several times as he blubbered out his last words. His message was incoherent anyway.

After the execution was over, two brothers and a sister of the younger victim addressed the media. One brother angrily talked about justice served. The sister said pretty much the same thing. The killer was dead, and it was good and just. The other brother stood by quietly. The sister asked him what he had to say.

“I saw a man who died alone,” he said.

The brother and sister stormed angrily out of the room.

The Joe Wood execution in Arizona in 2014, which I also witnessed, took nearly two hours. Afterward, the sister/daughter of the two victims and her husband protested that reporters, including me, had called the execution “botched.”

The husband asked why they couldn’t have just shot him, or killed him with Drano. Two hours of gasping, choking suffocation was not closure enough.

Sometimes there is acceptance.

There was a teenager sent away for life for shooting two other teens at a Subway restaurant in Phoenix in 2005. He went to the same school as the kids he killed. And when he arrived at his first court appearance after being arrested for the murders, he had already tattooed two tear drops beneath one eye to signify that he had killed two people. Talk about a defense attorney’s nightmare!

After the sentencing, there was a press conference outside the courthouse. I don’t remember who was speaking, because I was watching the scene unfolding behind the speaker: The mother of one of the dead boys was embracing the mother of the killer.

I walked over afterward and asked her why she had done that.

“She lost a son, too,” she said.

That woman and her husband went on to establish a Spanish-language chapter of Parents of Murdered Children so that they could help others.

I don’t know if that’s closure, but it may be as close as you get.