Utah’s parole board will not stop the upcoming execution for Taberon Honie, putting an end to one of the death row inmate’s last chances to avoid his death by lethal injection in less than two weeks.
The five-member board announced Friday it would not grant Honie clemency after holding an emotional commutation hearing earlier this week — where Honie and his family members asked them to save his life, while the victim’s family tearfully pleaded with them to end it.
Ultimately, the board said in a short written decision that it did not find “sufficient cause” to grant Honie clemency.
Unlike in other states, Utah’s governor doesn’t have the power to grant a death row inmate commutation — that rests with the parole board. So with its denial, this brings Honie one step closer to his Aug. 8 execution.
The 48-year-old man still has a lawsuit pending, where he is challenging the execution protocols and whether he was given enough notice to research the drug that prison officials plan to use in his execution. Arguments are expected in that case Tuesday.
When reached Friday, a spokesperson for the Utah attorney general’s office did not comment on the board’s decision. Therese Day, one of Honie’s attorneys, said their legal team was “saddened and disappointed” by the board’s decision.
“The person who committed the offense 26 years ago is not the same person who will be executed in two weeks,” she said in a statement. “What has remained the same is Mr. Honie’s sincere remorse and acceptance of responsibility for the crimes he committed.”
Day said the parole board had the power to change Honie’s fate. But his execution, she said, “will only inflict more trauma that will have a ripple effect into future generations.”
Earlier this week, at his commutation hearing, Honie questioned whether he deserved the parole board’s mercy after killing his ex-girlfriend’s mother, Claudia Benn, in 1998. But ultimately, he asked the parole board: “Would you allow me to exist?”
Honie said he wanted to keep living to be a support to his daughter, who is now 27 and has a child of her own.
He also told them that he has changed from the 22-year-old man who attacked and killed Benn. Had he not been extremely intoxicated that night in 1998, he said, he doesn’t believe he would have killed her.
Honie’s attorneys also presented evidence to the parole board about the death row inmate’s traumatic childhood growing up on a Hopi reservation — which they said contributed to his alcohol and drug misuse 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 night when he killed Benn, they argued.
That July day, Honie called his ex-girlfriend and demanded she visit him, threatening to kill her family if she refused. Later that evening, Honie took a cab to Benn’s home. He broke the door in with a rock and then beat and bit Benn, slashed her throat, stabbed her genitals multiple times and prepared to have anal sex with her before realizing she had died. Three children were in the home during the attack, including his daughter and a child that he also sexually assaulted that evening.
Lawyers with the Utah attorney general’s office had argued that the parole board should not second-guess the judge’s 1999 decision to hand down a death sentence, and that Honie did not deserve their mercy because of the brutal nature of his crimes.
Four of Benn’s family members recounted their memories with her during the commutation hearing, recalling that she was a strong Paiute woman who was helping her tribe in her work as a substance abuse counselor. They asked the parole board to let the execution move forward.
“Personally, I think that we should just close the book,” said Betsy China, Benn’s cousin. “My choice would be the death penalty. Just get this over.”
