Utah spent more than a quarter of a million dollars to execute Taberon Honie earlier this month, prison officials estimated in a news release Tuesday.
The state estimated that it paid $288,685.29 for Honie’s lethal injection death on Aug. 8, the first death sentence carried out in Utah in 14 years. The majority of that cost — more than $260,000 — was for medical services and supplies. Prison officials have previously said it paid $200,000 for the pentobarbital that was used to kill Honie, who was 48 years old. That’s twice what Idaho officials paid for the same drug last year.
Other costs that the Utah Department of Corrections paid for the execution included nearly $11,000 for personnel and to pay overtime, and almost $17,000 for “event expenses” like supplies and other equipment.
Glen Mills, the communications director for the Utah Department of Corrections, said the money used for the execution came from the department’s general budget.
Honie was on Utah’s death row for 25 years before he was executed for sexually assaulting and killing his ex-girlfriend’s mother, Claudia Benn, in 1998.
(Rick Bowmer | AP) Death row inmate Taberon Honie leaves for break during the Utah Board of Pardons commutation hearing Tuesday, July 23, 2024, at the Utah State Correctional Facility, in Salt Lake City.
Prison officials previously noted that, on average, it costs about $51,000 to house a typical prison inmate in Utah for a year.
An execution is a rare event in Utah. Prior to Honie’s death, the last time the state executed a man was in 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by firing squad. Previously, Utah’s last lethal injection death was in 1999.
In July 1998, 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 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. Three children were in the home during the attack, including his daughter and a child that he also sexually assaulted that same evening.
A judge sentenced Honie to death in 1999, and he appealed that decision for more than two decades — including several efforts in the weeks before his death where he asked Utah’s parole board for clemency and filed a lawsuit challenging an untested three-drug combination prison officials initially planned to use in his execution. None of these efforts were successful, and a judge ultimately dismissed his lawsuit after prison officials were able to obtain the pentobarbital which was used to kill him.
Utah’s attorney general’s office is currently seeking another death warrant for another inmate, Ralph Menzies. State lawyers asked a judge in January to issue the warrant, saying Menzies’ appeals have run out and there is no legal reason to stop his execution. But the court process stalled almost immediately after Menzies’ lawyers argued that the inmate has dementia and can’t legally be executed. An evidentiary hearing, which will explore whether he is competent, is scheduled for November.
Menzies has chosen to die by firing squad. While that execution option was phased out in Utah in 2004, inmates who were convicted previously still can choose that option.
Menzies was sentenced to death in 1988 for killing Maurine Hunsaker, a 26-year-old mother of three. He abducted her from a Kearns convenience store where she was working, and her body was later found at a Big Cottonwood Canyon picnic area. She had been strangled and her throat had been cut.
