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Utah has now ended its decade-long execution hiatus after an inmate was put to death for the murder of his ex-girlfriend’s mother.
Taberon Dave Honie died by lethal injection early on Thursday morning at the Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City.
In his final words, the 48-year-old said: “If it needs to be done for them to heal, let’s do this.”
“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.”
When the executioner then administered two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital, Honie reportedly tapped his foot and mouthed “I love you” to his family members who were watching from the witness chamber.
Warden Bart Mortensen told reporters that Honie also turned and thanked correctional officers for taking care of his family before he lost consciousness.
It took about 17 minutes for him to die.
Honie – who grew up on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona – spent his last evening with his daughter Tressa, who said she felt caught between her mother’s family mourning her grandmother and her own grief for her father.
“I feel like I have to heal alone”, she explained in an interview.
For his last meal, Honie then requested a cheeseburger, french fries and a milkshake.
His family was given permission to perform a Native American grieving ritual to help free his soul following the removal of his body.
He had been on death row for 25 years after his 1999 conviction for the brutal murder of Claudia Benn in July 1998.
After a day of heavy drinking, the then-22-year-old broke into Benn’s home in Cedar City before slashing her throat and stabbing other parts of her body.
He was also found to have sexually abused one of Benn’s two grandchildren – one of them aged just two years old – who were both in the house at the time.
In July, Honie’s attorneys unsuccessfully petitioned the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole to commute his sentence to life in prison.
The legal team described Honie’s troubled childhood growing up with parents who abused alcohol and asked that he be allowed “to exist” so he could support his own daughter. The bid was denied.
As well as being the first since 2010, Honie’s execution was also Utah’s eighth since 1976, when the Supreme Court ruled capital punishment legal in the US.
The last inmate put to death in the state was Ronnie Lee Gardner who chose to be executed by firing squad – the first time the method was used in the US in 14 years. Gardner was shot by a team of five marksmen using .30 calibre rifles.
Although Utah had adopted lethal injection as the default execution method in 2004, Gardner retained the right to choose the controversial method as he was sentenced before a change in law.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), no other executions are currently scheduled for Utah. There are now five remaining inmates on death row in the state, after Utah’s Supreme Court overturned Douglas Lovell’s death sentence last month.
Lovell was twice convicted for murdering Joyce Yost in 1985 to prevent her from testifying against him on charges that he raped her. Lovell’s death sentence was overturned after he argued his lawyers “rendered ineffective assistance” when they failed to object or respond to testimony from bishops of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who volunteered at the prison.
A 2020 poll found 64 per cent of people in Utah supported the death penalty – 10 per cent higher than the national average, KUTV reported.
Honie’s execution marked the second in the US this week, after Arthur Lee Burton was put to death on Wednesday in Texas for the murder of mother-of-three Nancy Adleman in 1997.
