Cost of Utah’s execution of Taberon Honie topped $288K, not including legal expenses

Restraints are shown on the lethal injection table in the execution chamber at the Utah State Correctional Facility after the Taberon Honie execution Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Salt Lake City. (Pool photo by Rick Bowmer/AP)

Utah prison officials on Tuesday released their estimated price tag of executing Taberon Honie earlier this month, reporting a total cost of more than $288,000.

That estimate includes the cost of operations on the taxpayer’s dime within the Utah Department of Corrections for the execution itself — and does not include legal expenses involving the Utah Attorney General’s Office, public defenders, judges, clerks and court staff after more than two decades of appeals and court hearings while Honie was on death row that likely totaled millions of dollars more.

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Honie, 48, was pronounced dead at 12:25 a.m. on Aug. 8 after being injected with two doses of pentobarbital. He was sentenced to death in 1999 for the violent murder of his ex-girlfriend’s mother, Claudia Benn, after breaking into her home and sexually assaulting her.

Honie’s death sentence, imposed by the 5th District Court, led to Utah’s first execution in over a decade and the state’s first lethal injection since 1999. Utah News Dispatch was among the media witnesses for the execution.

The priciest expense for Honie’s execution was “medical services and supplies,” according to the Utah Department of Corrections, which totaled $260,906.56. The bulk of that included about $200,000 for the lethal injection of pentobarbital, which Honie’s attorney pointed out in a letter asking the governor to delay the execution was “more than twice what any other state has paid.”

State corrections officials previously planned to spend about $7,900 for a drug cocktail of ketamine, fentanyl and potassium chloride to lethally inject Honie, according to court documents. But in the weeks leading up to Honie’s execution, state officials changed course in favor of purchasing pentobarbital, a more expensive drug but one that undercut legal arguments from Honie’s attorneys against using an untested cocktail.

How a law passed earlier this year made executions in Utah a more secretive process

Corrections officials also estimated they spent nearly $11,000 on “personnel and overtime” to pay for prison staff time for the execution. Plus, about $16,800 was spent on “event expenses” like “supplies and equipment.” The Department of Corrections’ cost analysis released Tuesday did not include any more specifics or a breakdown of what those expenses included.

Many details surrounding Honie’s execution remain shrouded in secrecy . These questions remain unanswered: Where did Utah buy the pentobarbital that was used? Who administered it? And what were the credentials of the execution team?

Those details will likely remain unclear, even for Honie’s attorneys, after a new law, SB109 , passed earlier this year upped the secrecy surrounding executions in Utah, part of a nationwide trend to conceal the source of lethal injection drugs and the identity of those who administer them.

The nearly 1,000-line law imposed various tweaks to how the Department of Corrections operates and increased coordination between county jails and prisons, among other provisions. The law also prevents the release of certain records related to executions, including any “identifying information” of the people who take part in the process — that includes the medical team, corrections workers, contractors, consultants, executioners administering the drugs, and other staff or volunteers.

Contributing: Kyle Dunphey

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