Taberon Honie dies by lethal injection, the first execution in Utah in 14 years

Taberon Dave Honie died by lethal injection early Thursday, a quarter-century after he was sentenced to death for sexually assaulting and killing his ex-girlfriend’s mother in a brutal attack when he was 22 years old.

Claudia Benn was his own daughter’s grandmother, and the murder divided the family, with Benn’s daughter and other relatives recently urging officials to carry out the death sentence as Honie’s daughter and others pleaded for his life. Family members of both Benn and Honie witnessed his execution, which took place just after midnight.

Honie spoke his last words while strapped to the execution table.

“From the start, it’s been, if it needs to be done for them to heal, let’s do this,” he said into a microphone held by a prison worker. “If they tell you you can’t change, don’t listen to them. To all my brothers and sisters here, continue to change. I love you all, take care.”

Randall Honey, director of prison operations, later said Honie then spoke to him and prison warden Bart Mortensen — words that were not captured by the microphone, and not heard directly by those witnessing the execution. Honey said Honie told them, “Thank you for taking care of my family.” Honie then looked toward where his family was seated, Honey said, and told them, “I love you.” Honie’s mother replied, “I love you, son,” added Glen Mills, communications director for the Department of Corrections.

The execution was the state’s first in 14 years. Honie was 48 years old.

[Read more: An eyewitness account of Taberon Honie’s execution in Utah]

It took 17 minutes from when the first dose of pentobarbital was given to Honie to when an electrocardiogram detected his heart was no longer beating. He was pronounced dead at 12:25 a.m.

Honie was given a second dose of pentobarbital about five minutes into his execution at the advice of medical professionals, said Corrections Director Brian Redd.

In the minutes between midnight and the announcement that Honie’s execution had been carried out, a crowd of about 40 protesters waited in silence in a free speech zone two miles from the prison. At 12:34 a.m., Abraham Bonowitz, co-founder and executive director of Death Penalty Action, picked up a microphone and told the crowd, “the execution has been confirmed, and the world is no safer. Utah is no safer.”

After Honie gave his final remarks, he began tapping his right foot in what appeared to be a sign of nervousness. He then lifted his head and took a deep exhaling breath. His chest continued to rise and fall for the first few minutes of the execution before he became still.

Honie’s skin turned pale, then blue. At 12:21 a.m., after an EKG readout indicated his heart had stopped, Honey and Mortensen lifted a white sheet over the top of Honie’s body and a curtain was drawn.

After Honie’s death, his father and cousin were allowed into the execution room and performed a Hopi ceremony to help free his soul, Honey explained. The ceremony included using feathers and cornmeal to lead “a path for the soul to leave the room,” he said.

The last time the state executed a man was in 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by firing squad. Utah’s last lethal injection death was in 1999.

Honie’s last hours

In a series of briefings hours before his death, prison officials said Honie had sat on the floor in an observation cell for most of the day, talking with family members he could see through a window in the room. They visited with him in pairs, rotating in and out of a room adjacent to his cell for nearly 10 hours. His mood was described by prison staff as “gracious and appreciative.”

He ate a cheeseburger, fries and a milkshake around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. But prison officials said Honie told them that he wanted his last meal to be remembered as one he had recently shared with his family, Mills said.

Honie, who is from the Hopi-Tewa tribal community, also participated in a pipe ceremony and a smudging ceremony the Monday before his execution, according to prison officials. Both are considered sacred ceremonies in Indigenous culture. And earlier in the week, he spoke at length by phone with a spiritual leader from his Hopi reservation in Arizona, prison officials said.

Protesters rallied throughout the day to show their opposition to capital punishment — first on the steps of the state Capitol Wednesday morning, and later in the designated protest zone on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. It was the first execution at the new prison, built in 2022.

An attorney for the advocates filed a legal challenge to the location distant from the prison Wednesday afternoon, but 3rd District Judge Laura Scott found that evening that the court papers had been improperly filed, and that they didn’t contain enough information for her to force the prison to move the free speech zone.

On Wednesday evening, protesters gathered at the site just off a two-lane road that runs through dry green and yellow sagebrush and wild grasses. People began reciting the rosary at about the time Honie was set to be taken from the observation room into the execution room. A small speaker amplified the prayer over the steady hum of generators powering flood lights illuminating the protest zone.

“As I always ask the government, and the people in the prison, and the people who are going to put the needle in him: Why kill people who killed people to show us Americans that to kill people is wrong? It is not a deterrent,” said anti-death penalty advocate SueZanna Bosler. “It has not worked and never will work.”

Attorney General Sean Reyes, whose office defended against Honie’s appeals and ultimately sought his death warrant, defended that decision early Thursday after Honie’s death.

”Death by execution is one of the most extreme uses of government power. Many would argue it is ineffective, improper and beyond the authority of man to exercise,” Reyes wrote. “Many would disagree.” The “unprovoked taking of innocent lives” deserves the “harshest” possible punishment, he said, adding that in Utah, that includes the death penalty.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said in a statement early Thursday morning that Honie’s crimes were “heinous.”

“I respect the process of our criminal justice system, and recognize the countless public servants who meticulously planned and approached their responsibilities with professionalism,” he said. “I hope this brings closure to those impacted by the crimes. My heart goes out to the victim’s family.”

Honie’s legal team, Eric Zuckerman and Therese Day, emphasized in a statement Thursday morning that Honie always accepted responsibility and expressed deep remorse for his crimes, which they said he committed while he was “extremely intoxicated” from drugs and alcohol.

“Over the past twenty-five years, Mr. Honie worked on himself to become a better person,” they wrote. “Today, he was not the same man he was twenty-six years ago when he committed these crimes. We are saddened that despite this change, the State of Utah did not grant him mercy. Mr. Honie’s life had value — he was worthy of redemption, and not being judged solely by his worst actions.”

Honie’s crimes

Honie didn’t plan to kill anyone on July 9, 1998, he told Utah’s parole board during his commutation hearing last month. That morning, he had tried to find work with friends — and when they couldn’t find any, they started partying.

At 8:30 a.m., he had his first drink. Honie, then 22, continued drinking alcohol during the day and started using drugs. He wanted to get drunk and pass out, he said. But that’s not what happened.

At some point, he called his ex-girlfriend — with whom he shared a daughter — and demanded that she see him, threatening to kill her family if she didn’t. He had made these types of threats before, prosecutors have said, without acting on them. So his ex-girlfriend went to work.

Later that evening, sometime before midnight, Honie took a cab to Benn’s Cedar City home, where his ex-girlfriend also lived. Honie told the parole board he planned to sleep under the porch until his ex-girlfriend returned home from work, and he thought he might be able to see their young daughter — one of three grandchildren Benn was babysitting while her daughters were working.

Instead, Honie broke open a glass door with a rock and went inside Benn’s home. He argued with her, and grabbed a butcher knife from her that prosecutors say she had grabbed to try to protect herself.

Trial testimony and evidence showed that Honie beat and bit Benn after breaking in, slashed her throat, stabbed her genitals multiple times, and had prepared to have anal sex with her before realizing she had died. He killed Benn in front of several children, including his young daughter and another child whom he also sexually assaulted that same night.

At Honie’s commutation hearing, Benn’s niece recalled seeing the bloody crime scene when she went to Benn’s home the next morning.

“We busted in the door and there was blood all over the damn house,” Sarah China said between sobs. “She fought for her life. She saved her grandkids, too. That’s a strong Paiute woman right there.”

Benn was born in Kingman, Arizona, in June 1949, but grew up in Page, according to her obituary. She later moved to towns in Arizona and Utah before she went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Utah. There, she worked at the Women’s’ Resource Center helping women get scholarships to pursue higher education.

After she graduated, she became a substance abuse counselor and “advocated sobriety amongst her people, and the traditional way of life,” the obituary said.

Her family remembered her as a loving mother, grandmother, aunt, cousin, friend and counselor, who loved bingo, going to powwows and playing cards with her family. ”Her greatest joy was her grandchildren,” it said, “and seeing her nephew and nieces achieve their goals.”

At the commutation hearing, Honie’s legal team presented evidence about his traumatic childhood growing up on a Hopi reservation — which he said contributed to his alcohol and drug abuse at an early age. These experiences, along with a number of head injuries he received as a child, had a “synergistic effect” with his “extreme intoxication” on the July night in 1998 when he killed Benn, his attorneys argued in his commutation petition.

Fighting a death sentence for 25 years

Some of the men who have previously been executed in Utah eventually gave up their appeals and were killed. But not Honie, who has fought his execution for 25 years.

None of his appeals were successful. That included arguing to the Utah Supreme Court after his 1999 sentencing that he was unfairly discriminated against because he is part of the Hopi tribe.

In the early appeal, he argued that the trial prosecutor acted improperly when he compared the value of Honie’s life to the value of Benn’s — and noted that Honie “did not murder a drunken Indian in the park” or someone who spent her life “drinking alcohol and puking and walking the streets and shoplifting” at Walmart.

“He murdered someone that these people look up to,” the prosecutor had argued. “He murdered a superstar in the Paiute community.”

But the state’s high court ruled that these statements likely didn’t influence the judge who ordered him to death. In his 1999 decision, that judge condemned the prosecutor’s statements and wrote that he would have decided the same “had the victim been ‘a drunken Indian in the park’ or a drunken white man in the park, or a sober doctor in his office, etc.”

“Each human life is of equal value,” the judge continued. “The murder of any victim under the circumstances of this case, no matter what that victim[’]s status, would have been just as painful, traumatic, and reprehensible, and would require the same punishment.”

Honie was the youngest man on Utah’s death row, and, at 25 years, he has spent the least amount of time awaiting his sentence. His legal team had pushed forward a flurry of appeals and lawsuits in his final days, but it didn’t change the outcome.

Those appeals included challenging the drugs the Department of Corrections was planning to use to execute him. Initially, prison officials planned to execute Honie with the never-before-used combination of ketamine, fentanyl and potassium chloride. This came at the recommendation of an unnamed pharmacist, according to court records, who advised Utah officials that the more commonly used death drug pentobarbital was not available.

But Honie sued over the three-drug combination, arguing that the novel concoction risked a torturous death in violation of Utah’s constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys offered in that lawsuit that pentobarbital would be a better alternative. It’s a proven death penalty drug that’s been used in 14 other states, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Prison officials eventually connected with a source for pentobarbital — a supplier which has been kept secret from the public — and they paid $200,000 for three doses of the death drug.