Sitting in front of Utah’s parole board, his hands shackled to a chain around his waist, Taberon Honie posed a question he’s been wrestling with: How can he ask this five-member group to spare his life when he took someone else’s?
Honie, a 48-year-old from the Hopi-Tewa community, was there Monday to ask the board members to stop his execution, scheduled in 17 days, and instead allow him to live the rest of his life in prison. But in making that ask, Honie questioned aloud whether he deserves their mercy after brutally killing Claudia Benn, his ex-girlfriend’s mother, in 1998 while three children — including his own young daughter — were in Benn’s Cedar City home.
“I don’t know how I can come and ask you guys to spare me when I took Claudia,” Honie said. “But I owe it to my daughter and my mother to come ask if it’s a possibility.”
He’s changed from the 22-year-old man who killed Benn, Honie told them. And had he not been extremely intoxicated that night in 1998, he said, he doesn’t believe he would have killed her. Honie emphasized that he’s not asking to be let out of prison — nor does he think he deserves that.
“I lost that right,” he said of living outside prison walls. “I lost any hold I had on society when I committed my crimes. I earned my place in prison. What I’m asking you today to consider is: would you allow me to exist?”
“I’ve shown I can exist in prison,” he added. “I’m not a threat to the public. I’m not a threat to anyone.”
(Rick Bowmer | AP) Death row inmate Taberon Honie is cuffed as he sits during the Utah Board of Pardons commutation hearing Monday, July 22, 2024, at the Utah State Correctional Facility, in Salt Lake City.
Asking Utah’s parole board for clemency is one of Honie’s last chances to try to stop his execution by lethal injection, currently scheduled for Aug. 8. Monday’s hearing focused on the reasons why Honie believes his life should be spared; on Tuesday, lawyers with the attorney general’s office plan to make their arguments about why Honie does not deserve the parole board’s mercy. Also on Tuesday, two victim representatives are expected to speak.
A commutation hearing is rare in Utah. The last time that the parole board held this type of hearing was in 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner asked its members to spare his life. The board denied his request, and he was killed by firing squad three days later.
The board will later announce if it will grant Honie clemency. The board has said that it will be able to make its decision prior to his scheduled execution date.
Questioned about his crime
Board members peppered Honie with questions about the night that he killed Benn. He said he struggled to remember much of what happened, telling the board that he had been drunk and high.
He started drinking alcohol at 8:30 a.m. that morning, he told them. He had gone with others to look for work and when they didn’t have luck, they started drinking and using drugs. A “big ass party,” he said.
When asked what his plan was that day, he replied, “Get wasted and go pass out.”
But that’s not what happened. Honie talked to his ex-girlfriend on the phone that day, and they had a heated conversation. Later that evening, sometime before midnight, Honie took a cab to Benn’s house, 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.
(Rick Bowmer | AP) Death row inmate Taberon Honie leaves the Utah Board of Pardons commutation hearing Monday, July 22, 2024, at the Utah State Correctional Facility, in Salt Lake City.
Honie said he doesn’t remember breaking a glass door into Benn’s home and going inside, as evidence showed he had. He doesn’t remember arguing with her, but he said it was probably about how he had previously beat up Benn’s daughter, his ex.
He does remember grabbing a knife from Benn, Honie said, but he has no memory of attacking her.
“If I had been in my right mind,” Honie said, “I would not have committed this crime.”
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 one whom he also sexually assaulted that same evening.
“I’m the one who did those things,” Honie told the parole board. “I’m the one who took Ms. Benn’s life. Am I proud of it? Hell no. Was it planned? Hell no. Sorry to use that language, but no it wasn’t planned.”
A traumatic childhood on a Hopi reservation
Before Honie spoke, his 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.
One expert who testified for Honie was Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, the head of the Department of American Indian Studies at University of Arizona. Gilbert, like Honie, is Hopi.
Gilbert spoke to the board about the damaging effects Indian boarding schools, like those Honie’s parents both attended, have had on the Hopi community, an Indigenous group who live in northeast Arizona. The purpose of these boarding schools, Gilbert said, was to assimilate Indigenous children into white culture and teach them industrial trades.
The goal of these boarding schools was not to train the next generation of Indigenous doctors or lawyers, Gilbert said, but to “create an Indian working class” that would assimilate into white culture and fill the labor needs of nearby cities. And by stripping these children of their culture, the professor said, they never learned family skills and missed out on participating in Hopi culture.
“They were removed from their parents. They no longer had the examples of their parents,” Gilbert said. “They no longer had the opportunity to learn from their parents, aunties and uncles, or other village members.”
So by the time Honie’s parents were raising their own children, they didn’t have parenting examples from their own childhood to draw from. Victoria Reynolds, a clinical psychologist hired by Honie’s legal team, detailed the volatile environment Honie grew up in.
His family lived in a two-room home with no running water or electricity, with the family sleeping in one room; the other room included a kitchen. The tight living quarters made it difficult for the children to escape their parents’ alcohol abuse and fighting. With his parents working long hours and leaving their home to drink alcohol, Reynolds said, it left Honie and his siblings without the care they needed from their parents. She said Honie wandered the reservation alone as a child, often in unclean clothes.
Neglected, Honie drank his first beer at age 5 and was using marijuana by 10; he also had several head injuries while young. Reynolds concluded that Honie had been exposed to trauma fairly relentlessly through childhood, and that affected him as an adult: Not just in his own drug and alcohol use, but in his ability to handle normal conflicts in relationships.
“The model he had [from his parents] was infidelity, fighting, leaving,” Reynolds said. “He didn’t have another model.”
Honie’s mother, Teresita, told the parole board Monday that she worked hard to provide for her family, and turned away food stamps or other government help. She remembered Honie as a caring child who helped older women in their village get wood or water.
“I’m told that you all would like to take his life away,” she said. “To this I say, What life? Twenty-six years ago, my son’s life was taken. Since then, he exists in a facility being told when to eat, when to sleep, when to get up and when he can go out to get some sun. This is not life, but existence.”
A daughter ‘affected on both sides’ of her family
But for Honie, the chance to just exist is enough. And he wants to keep existing, he said, for his daughter, who is now 27 and has a child of her own. He earned his high school diploma in prison — an effort, his attorneys have said, he made for his daughter so she wouldn’t use his lack of education as an excuse to derail her own.
His daughter, Tressa, told the board that she feels stuck in the middle of this painful family chapter, with “noise everywhere.” She was just two years old when her father killed her grandmother.
“I’m affected on both sides. That was my grandmother and that’s my father,” Tressa said. “Twenty-six years ago, I was robbed of a grandmother. And he also robbed me of himself.”
But her father, she said, has tried to be there for her as best as he could from prison — especially as she has been on her own journey in addiction and recovery.
Honie said supporting her is what brought him in front of the parole board. Through more than two decades of appeals, he often wanted to give up after losses in court. But he said Tressa always urged him to continue, saying, “I need you, Dad.”
So on Monday, he asked if he could live.