As someone who has closely followed the death penalty in the United States for the better part of the last decade, I've seen states abolish the death penalty, reinstate it, resume or pause executions, and engage in the bitter and emotionally-charged debate over its retention.
I myself make no secret of my ardent support for capital punishment, but in recent years it seems my side has been fighting a losing battle, as state after state abolishes the death penalty with nearly yearly frequency.
Two years ago, I feared that the state of Utah would be next on the proverbial chopping block. At the time, an abolition bill was pending in the legislature with wide bipartisan support and the backing of some family members of murder victims.
A similar bill to abolish the death penalty had actually passed the Utah State Senate in 2016, only to be narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives. But this time, the House bill seemed poised to pass, and the prospect of abolition was realistic enough that even the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, seemed open to signing the bill.
Fortunately for Utah's justice system, the abolition bill was defeated in a house committee by a single vote. But even so, the death penalty in Utah appeared quite dead. The state has not handed down a death sentence since 2015 (even then, it was a resentencing hearing for an inmate already on death row), and the state had not conducted an execution since 2010, when convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner died by firing squad.
Of all the states whose death penalty systems seemed stuck in limbo, Utah was among the ones I least expected to ever resume executions.
That's why what happened this morning seemed all the more surreal.
Taberon Honie was one of eight inmates awaiting execution on Utah's death row. His crime was horrific even by death row inmate standards.
Early on the morning of July 10, 1998, Taberon Honie broke into the house of his ex-girlfriend's mother - Claudia Benn - in Cedar City, Utah, where she and her two young grandchildren slept. Honie - drunk and high on drugs - proceeded to violently assault Benn, beating and choking her. Claudia Benn grabbed a kitchen knife to fight back, but Honie overpowered her, took the knife, and slashed the woman's throat, stabbed her multiple times, and then sexually violated her with the knife blade until her perineum was completely severed, slicing a giant gash from the victim's vagina to her anus and then raping the open wound.
 |
| Claudia Benn, 49, was brutally murdered and sexually mutilated by Taberon Honie in 1998 - an act of revenge by Honie against his ex-girlfriend, Claudia's daughter. |
After killing Claudia Benn, Taberon Honie hid in a closet with Benn's 4-year-old granddaughter, who had witnessed her grandmother's murder and was covered in her blood. Honie then sexually assaulted the young girl in the closet, inserting his finger into her vagina until she began bleeding. The young girl was still bleeding from her genitalia when police arrived at the murder scene.
Honie was convicted of aggravated murder a year later, in 1999, and was sentenced to death. For the next 25 years, he languished on death row with no execution date in sight, as his appeals endlessly dragged on.
Despite his conviction and death sentence being repeatedly upheld, most court observers believed that Honie would probably die in prison long before he would be close to execution, as Utah's death penalty faced legislative challenges and steep roadblocks pertaining to the acquisition of lethal injection drugs.
So when the state of Utah announced last month that they had acquired drugs for lethal injection and set an execution date for Honie, I was caught completely by surprise. So, too, it seems, was Honie, who began a series of ultimately futile legal efforts to stop his execution.
Honie's attorneys tried to paint him as a repentant man who had changed in the 26 years since his crime. Honie's allies in the anti-death-penalty movement furiously protested against his impending execution, braying endlessly about the death penalty's "cruelty" as supposed "state-sanctioned murder". And, perhaps most outlandishly - despite Honie having spent the past quarter-century on death row - they even screeched about Utah "rushing" to carry out his execution.
But their efforts would, in the end, be in vain. Earlier this morning, Taberon Honie finally faced justice for his horrific crime. In stark contrast to the death of Claudia Benn, Taberon Honie's final moments were clinical, quiet, and sterile.
 |
| The holding cell at Utah Territorial Correctional Facility, where Taberon Honie spent his final hours |
Shortly before midnight on August 8, 2024, Taberon Honie was led from his holding cell at the Utah State Correctional Facility to the new execution chamber down the hall. He was strapped to a plain, sand-colored gurney within the chamber - a gurney that had not seen use since 1999. Two IV lines were inserted into his arms and a saline solution was administered.
At 12:03 AM, the curtains to the four witness rooms in the chamber were parted. Honie lay strapped to the gurney, his arms extended at his sides on two armboards. Witnesses reported he seemed nervous, tapping his foot and shaking. Given the opportunity to make a final statement, Honie spoke into a microphone:
"From the start, it's been, if it needs to be done for them to heal, let's do this", he said, apparently in reference to the Benn family.
Next, Honie seemed to address his fellow inmates. "If they tell you you can't change, don't listen to them. To all my brothers and sisters in here, continue to change. I love you all. Take care."
Honie turned to the warden. "Thank you for taking care of my family", he said, before turning to look at them in the witness room. "I love you", he mouthed.
With that, according to the Utah Department of Corrections' execution protocol, the lethal drugs - consisting of five grams of pentobarbital - began to flow down the IV lines into Honie's arms.
The execution was complete in less than 17 minutes. At 12:25 PM, Taberon Honie became the eighth person to be judicially executed by the state of Utah since 1976, and the first by lethal injection since the execution of Joseph Parsons in 1999. The convicted murderer died peacefully, quietly, and painlessly - a far cry from the way that Claudia Benn had died at his hands 26 years earlier.
 |
| Taberon Honie died by lethal injection on this gurney in the newly-built execution chamber of Utah State Correctional Facility. His execution was the first to occur in Utah in 14 years, and the first by lethal injection in nearly 25 years. |
There is bound to be a reinvigoration of the debate surrounding capital punishment in Utah in the wake of this execution. Such discussions are all too common in the aftermath of a state resuming executions after a long hiatus, and Utah will be no different.
I can only hope, however, that the state of Utah will continue to fight to maintain the ultimate punishment as a sentence for those convicted of the most heinous and depraved of murders, as Taberon Honie was.
In recent years, Utah has allowed a great many heinous murderers - including cop-killers, child murderers, and recidivist murderers - to avoid proper justice, as district attorneys have been reluctant to seek the death penalty due to its Kafkaesque appeals systems and the unreliability of executions actually being able to be carried out.
Much of the rising opposition to the death penalty in Utah has come from those who are frustrated with the long appeals process and inability for the state to carry out executions, and anti-death-penalty propagandists have been able to exploit these frustrations to further an agenda that runs counter to a fair and effective justice system - not just in Utah, but in other states as well.
Hopefully, with the execution of Taberon Honie - and with it the reaffirmation of the principle that, even if it takes years, justice will ultimately be done - things will begin to change.
Comments
Post a Comment