Utah officials are scheduled to hear testimony on Monday about whether a man facing execution next month he should be spared the death penalty for a murder that occurred in 1998 and remain in prison for the rest of his life.
The parole board hearing comes after state officials said Saturday that no longer plan to use an untested combination of execution drugs that Taberon Dave Honie’s lawyers said could have caused him “excruciating pain.” Instead, they will use a different drug – pentobarbital.
The execution scheduled for Aug. 8 would be the first in Utah since Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by firing squad in 2010, according to the state Department of Corrections.
Honie’s lawyers said a traumatic and violent childhood, along with his long-standing drug abuse, a previous brain injury and extreme intoxication fueled his behavior when he broke into his girlfriend’s mother’s home and killed her.
They blamed a lack of legal advice for allowing Honie — a native of the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona — to be sentenced by a judge instead of a jury that could 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 a commutation petition filed last month. They added that Honie has an adult daughter and is “worthy of mercy.”
Lawyers for the state urged the board to reject the request.
They said the judge who sentenced Honie already considered his remorse, his difficult upbringing and his drunken state when he killed 49-year-old Claudia Benn. Honie, then 22, broke a glass door to get into Benn’s home while she was home with her grandchildren, then severely beat her and cut her in the throat, vagina and around the anus, according to court documents.
Police arrived at the home and found him covered in blood, documents say.
“Honie says the board should have mercy on him because he took responsibility for Claudia’s murder,” the state’s lawyers wrote. “The commutation petition itself is a long deflection of responsibility that never acknowledges any of the savage acts he inflicted on Claudia or her granddaughters.”
Honie was convicted in 1999 of aggravated murder.
A two-day hearing is scheduled on Honie’s request for a commutation. A decision is expected to come at a later date.
After decades of failed appeals, the warrant for Honie’s execution was signed last month, despite objections from defense lawyers who raised concerns about the planned lethal drug combination. When Honie’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over the matter, prison officials agreed to switch to pentobarbital, which had already been used in several states.
There is evidence that pentobarbital can also cause extreme painincluding federal executions carried out in the last few months of Donald Trump’s presidency.
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