Utah’s parole board announced Friday afternoon that it will hold a commutation hearing for death row inmate Taberon Honie, who has asked the board to stop his scheduled execution later this summer and instead allow him to live the rest of his life in prison.
Jennifer Yim, the administrative director for the Utah Boards of Pardon and Parole, called this a “pivotal step” that she said shows the board’s commitment to fairness and integrity within Utah’s criminal justice system. The five-member parole board is now expected to hold a hearing in July, and the board is expected to rule before Honie’s scheduled Aug. 8 execution.
“The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole remains committed to fostering a process rooted in procedural justice, and accountability, while ensuring that every decision reflects these core principles,” Yim said.
The board’s announcement comes two weeks after Honie filed a petition asking its members to spare his life. It’s one of the last steps that Honie, 48, and from the Hopi-Tewa tribal community, can take to try to stop his execution.
In response, Utah attorney general’s office filed a 56-page document last week arguing that Honie didn’t deserve the chance to have a commutation hearing. A copy of the filing was released to The Salt Lake Tribune Friday in response to a public records request.
The state attorneys said that converting his sentence to life without parole is an “extraordinary measure” which allows the parole board to show him mercy. But that mercy, they argued, is not deserved.
In July 1998, Honie called his ex-girlfriend and demanded she visit him, threatening to kill her family if she refused. Later that evening, sometime before midnight, Honie took a cab to the house of Claudia Benn, his ex-girlfriend’s mother. He broke the door in with a rock and then beat, bit, stabbed and sexually assaulted Benn as he killed her, court documents state.
“There is no question about Honie’s guilt; he does not — and cannot — contend otherwise,” the A.G. response reads. “There is also no question about the brutality and heinous nature of his crime, although Honie’s petition does not begin to confront those facts and instead euphemizes what he did as a ‘tragic death,’ the consequence of a ‘domestic dispute.’”
Honie has been on death row for the last 25 years — more than half of his life — as his attorneys appealed his conviction in state and federal courts. A judge earlier this month cleared the way for his execution, ruling that there was no longer any legal reason to delay it.
In Honie’s plea to cancel the planned lethal injection, his attorney recounted to the parole board Honie’s traumatic childhood growing up on a Hopi reservation — which he said contributed to 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 when he killed Benn, they argue.
But state attorneys argued in response that the sentencing judge knew of this background when he ordered Honie’s execution — and that the parole board shouldn’t grant a hearing and consider these reasons now. They argued that Honie is merely trying to relitigate the penalty phase from his trial, when a judge ordered him to die.
They focused much of their response on the brutal nature of Benn’s death: that in the course of killing her, Honie beat and bit her, slashed her throat, stabbed her genitals multiple times, and had prepared to have anal sex with her before realizing she had died. Other aggravating factors, they said, included that Honie committed the murder in front of several children, including one whom he also sexually assaulted that same evening.
Honie’s attorneys wrote in his petition that he has always shown remorse for the crime, and continues to show remorse. “I regret that I have no excuse for my actions,” he told Benn’s family at his 1999 sentencing. “My heart is sad. My soul cries out every time when I think of what I’ve done. Like I said, if I could change it all, I would. Believe me, I would.”
But state prosecutors argued in their response that he told police conflicting stories about how Benn died — including that he blacked out from alcohol intoxication and couldn’t remember, blaming the murder on the Mexican mafia, or casting Benn as the aggressor that night.
“Ultimately, his story was that Claudia provoked his response and the murder was an accident,” prosecutors wrote in an effort to show he wasn’t as remorseful as he claimed.
Honie’s attorneys have also filed a petition asking the Utah Supreme Court to delay his execution and order an evidentiary hearing to explore whether the state can use a never-before-used combination of ketamine, fentanyl and potassium chloride to execute him. The attorneys argued that the drug combination was untested and would likely result in a “torturous death.” Prosecutors in that case have asked the state’s high court to allow the execution to move forward.
