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SALT LAKE CITY — Just after midnight on Thursday morning, Taberon Davie Honie is scheduled to become the eighth person executed in Utah since 1977 after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.
Utah became the first state in the nation to execute a person after capital punishment became legal again in 1976. Gary Gilmore, 36, who killed two men in Utah County in 1976, gained international attention for choosing to be put to death by firing squad. His famously proclaimed, "Let's do it," before being shot.
Utah has executed three people by firing squad since 1977, the only state in the nation to carry out that form of execution. The other four people executed have been put to death by lethal injection. All seven put to death by the state have been men, and each person chose between lethal injection and the firing squad.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Utah executed five people. Only one person has been executed in Utah since 2000 — a statistic that seems to follow the national trend, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
"The use of the death penalty has declined sharply in the United States over the past 25 years. New death sentences have fallen more than 85% since peaking at more than 300 death sentences per year in the mid 1990s. Executions have declined by 75% since peaking at 98 in 1999," the center states on its website.
A poll by the Deseret News and Hinckley Institute of Politics in 2021 showed waning support for the death penalty in Utah. A slight majority of Utahns then — 51% — opposed eliminating Utah's death penalty as a sentencing option in future cases compared to 40% who supported doing away with it.
Since Gilmore's execution:
- Dale Selby Pierre, 34, one of the so-called Ogden Hi-Fi killers, was put to death by lethal injection in 1987. Pierre was convicted of the 1974 torture killings of three people and injuring two others.
- Arthur Gary Bishop, 35, was executed by lethal injection in 1988 for the killings of five boys between 1979 and 1983.
- Pierre's partner, William Andrews, 37, was put to death by lethal injection in 1992.
- Utah again received worldwide attention when John Albert Taylor, 36, was executed by firing squad in 1996 for the death of Charla Nicole King in 1989. Taylor chose the firing squad, allegedly to create controversy for the state.
- Joseph Mitchell Parsons, 35, died by lethal injection in 1999. He was convicted of killing Richard Lynn Ernest in southern Utah, after Ernest had picked up the hitchhiking Parsons. Compared to the executions of Taylor and later Ronnie Lee Gardner, Parsons' death did not attract much attention outside of Utah. Some believed that was due in part to Parsons publicly requesting that no one protest his death.
- The state's last execution was 14 years ago, on June 18, 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, was put to death by firing squad. Gardner killed Melvyn John Otterstrom, 37, during a robbery in 1984, and then shot and killed attorney Michael Burdell, 36, in 1985 during an unsuccessful escape attempt at the old Metropolitan Hall of Justice, after being slipped a gun that was smuggled to him.
In 2004, Utah banned the firing squad as an execution option. But the law was not retroactive, meaning those sentenced to death prior to 2004 could still choose the firing squad as an option. In 2005, the state modified the law so that the firing squad could be an option if the drugs needed for a lethal injection aren't available.
In July, defense attorneys for Honie, 48, claimed that the proposed cocktail Utah officials said they would use to put their client to death — a combination of ketamine, fentanyl and potassium chloride — was unconstitutional. About a week later, the Utah Department of Corrections said it had obtained pentobarbital, a drug that has been used previously in other executions around the nation, but at a cost of about $200,000.
In addition to Honie, there are currently five inmates on death row in Utah. Von Lester Taylor, Michael Anthony Archuleta and Douglas Carter have each elected to die by lethal injection. Troy Kell and Ralph Menzies have elected to be executed by firing squad.
Douglas Lovell, 67, was sentenced to die by lethal injection, but the Utah Supreme Court recently vacated his death sentence and sent the case back to district court. Menzies' death sentence process is also on hold while a determination is made about whether he is competent to proceed. A hearing in his case is scheduled for Aug. 12.
Unlike those executed in Utah between 1977 and 2010 — who were mainly men in their 30s — Taylor, 59, Archuleta, 62, Carter, 69, Kell, 56, and Menzies, 66, are more advanced in age following years and years of appeals. With the advanced ages, questions about an inmate's health, both physical and mental, are raised more often.
In 2019, one of Utah's most infamous death row inmates, Ron Lafferty, died of natural causes at age 78. He was sentenced to death for killing his sister-in-law and her 15-month-old daughter in 1984. Elroy Tillman was also sentenced to death at one point for the 1982 murder of Mark Schoenfeld. Tillman, now 89, had his death penalty reversed in 2005, and he has been ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison.
