Utah scraps untested lethal drug combination for man’s August execution

Utah officers mentioned Saturday that they’re scrapping plans to make use of an untested deadly drug mixture in subsequent month’s deliberate execution of a person in a 1998 homicide case. They’ll as an alternative search out a drug that’s been used beforehand in executions in quite a few states.

Protection attorneys for Taberon Dave Honie, 49, had sued in state courtroom to cease the usage of the drug mixture, saying it might trigger the defendant “excruciating struggling.”

The execution scheduled for Aug. 8 can be Utah’s first because the 2010 execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner, by firing squad.

Honie was convicted of aggravated homicide within the stabbing of his girlfriend’s mom, Claudia Benn, 49.

After a long time of failed appeals, Honie’s execution warrant was signed final month regardless of protection objections to the deliberate deadly drug mixture.

They mentioned the primary two medication he was to have been given —- the sedative ketamine and the anesthetic fentanyl — wouldn’t adequately stop Honie from feeling ache when potassium chloride was administered to cease his coronary heart.

In response, the Utah Division of Corrections has determined to as an alternative use a single drug — pentobarbital. Company spokesperson Glen Mills mentioned attorneys for the state filed courtroom paperwork in a single day Friday asking that the lawsuit be dismissed.

“We are going to acquire and use pentobarbital for the execution,” Mills mentioned. He mentioned company officers nonetheless imagine the three-drug mixture was efficient and humane.

State officers beforehand acknowledged that they knew of no different circumstances of the three-drug mixture being utilized in an execution.

A minimum of 14 states have used pentobarbital in executions, in response to the Dying Penalty Info Middle in Washington, D.C.

Nevertheless, there’s been proof that pentobarbital can also trigger excessive ache, together with in federal executions carried out in the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Honie’s legal professional within the lawsuit, federal defender Eric Zuckerman, didn’t instantly reply to an e-mail looking for remark.

In the meantime, a listening to is scheduled for Monday on Honie’s request to the state parole board to commute his dying sentence to life in jail.

Honie’s attorneys mentioned in a petition final month {that a} traumatic and violent childhood coupled together with his long-time drug abuse, a earlier mind harm and excessive intoxication fueled Honie’s conduct when he broke into his Benn’s home and killed her.

They blamed poor authorized recommendation for permitting Honie — a local of the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona — to be sentenced by a choose as an alternative of a jury that may have been extra sympathetic and spared him the dying penalty.