Utah officials will hear testimony Monday about whether a man facing execution Next month he should be spared the death penalty for a 1998 murder and should remain in prison for life.
The parole board hearing comes after state officials said Saturday they no longer planned for use an untested combination of execution drugs that Taberon Dave Honie’s attorneys said could cause him “excruciating pain.” Instead, they will use another drug: pentobarbital.
The execution, scheduled for Aug. 8, would be the first in Utah since Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by firing squad in 2010, according to the state Department of Corrections.
Honie’s lawyers allege a traumatic and violent childhood, combined with his long-term drug abuse, a previous brain injury and extreme drunkenness, shaped his behavior when he broke into his girlfriend’s mother’s home and murdered her.
They blamed poor legal advice for Honie, a native of the Hopi Indian reservation in Arizona, being convicted by a judge instead of a jury that might have been more sympathetic and spared him the death penalty.
“Mr. Honie has always shown genuine remorse and sorrow … from the moment he was arrested,” they wrote in a petition for commutation filed last month, adding that Honie has an adult daughter and “deserves mercy.”
Attorneys for the state urged the council to deny the request.
They said the judge who sentenced Honie took into account his remorse, his troubled upbringing and his state of intoxication when he killed 49-year-old Claudia Benn. Honie, then 22, smashed a glass door to enter Benn’s home while she was home with her grandchildren and then severely beat her, cutting her in the throat, vagina and around her anus, according to court documents.
The documents show that police arrived at the house and found him covered in blood.
“Honie says the board should show him mercy because he took responsibility for killing Claudia,” the state’s attorneys wrote. “The plea itself is a long disclaimer of responsibility that never once acknowledges the cruel acts he committed against Claudia or her granddaughters.”
Honie was convicted of aggravated murder in 1999.
A two-day hearing has been scheduled on Honie’s request for conversion, with a decision expected at a later date.
After decades of failed appeals, Honie’s execution warrant was signed last month over the objections of defense attorneys who raised concerns about the planned lethal drug combination. When Honie’s attorneys filed a lawsuit over the issue, prison officials agreed to switch to pentobarbital, which has been used previously in several states.
There are indications that pentobarbital can also cause extreme painincluding federal executions carried out in the last months of the presidency of Donald Trump.