Utah executes Taberon Honie by lethal injection

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.

“I don’t know how I can come and ask you guys to spare me when I took Claudia,” Honie said at his recent commutation hearing. “But I owe it to my daughter and my mother to come ask if it’s a possibility.”

The Board of Pardons denied his request for clemency and Gov. Spencer Cox rejected his request this week for a delay. Prison officials announced at 12:30 a.m. that the sentence had been carried out.

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

Additional details will be released at about 1:30 a.m. Thursday, prison officials said. Media witnesses, including Salt Lake Tribune reporter Jessica Miller, are expected to speak at the news conference.

In the minutes between midnight and the announcement that Honie’s execution had been carried out, a crowd of protesters in a free speech zone two miles from the prison waited in silence. 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.”

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

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.

In a series of briefing hours before his death, prison officials said Honie 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, said Glen Mills, who is the Department of Corrections communications director.

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.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Karin Tapahe, the public information officer for the Utah Department of Corrections, announces that the execution of Taberon Honie has been carried out at the Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City on Aug. 8, 2024. (Bethany Baker/)

Protesters rallied at 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 two miles from the prison, 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 distant location 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 site.

On Wednesday evening, protesters gathered just off a narrow, 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.

(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Janell Wilson of Layton joins the death penalty protest at a free speech zone outside the Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. (Francisco Kjolseth/)
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) SueZann Bosler speaks in opposition to the death penalty at a free speech zone outside the Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. (Francisco Kjolseth/)

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.”

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 Wal-mart.

“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 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.

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Utah executes Taberon Honie by lethal injection

Utah executes Taberon Honie by lethal injection

Utah executes Taberon Honie by lethal injection

Utah executes Taberon Honie by lethal injection

Utah executes Taberon Honie by lethal injection