Frances Newton Executed In Texas

Is 3rd Woman, And 1st Black Woman, Put To Death In State Since '82

(AP) 
Without dissent, the Supreme Court declined a pair of appeals about an hour before Newton was scheduled to be taken to the Texas death chamber.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which last year paved the way for Gov. Rick Perry to issue a reprieve about two hours before Newton was set to die, on Monday unanimously rejected a request that her death sentence be commuted to life in prison. Perry rejected another delay in the execution Wednesday afternoon.

She also lost appeals in state and lower federal courts. Her execution was the 13th this year in Texas. She was the 11th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court in 1976 allowed the death penalty to resume.

Newton didn't deny putting a gun in her 7-year-old son's knapsack and stashing the bag at an abandoned house. But she and her lawyers argued the .25-caliber blue steel revolver she hid was not the one used to fatally shoot her son, Alton; her 21-month-old daughter, Farrah; and her husband, Adrian, 23, at their Houston apartment.

Newton all along insisted she was innocent, and the claim about the gun was among several in her appeal to the Supreme Court. She also contended her trial attorneys were incompetent and evidence at her trial improperly was destroyed.

"I know I did not murder my kids and my family," she told The Associated Press in a death row interview. "It's frustrating ... nobody's had to answer for that."

Prosecutors called Newton's appeals meritless, noting that a second gun never was recovered, that repeated ballistics tests confirmed the gun she hid was the murder weapon, and that any destruction of evidence was not improper.

"The unbroken chain of custody directly links Newton to the murder weapon," the Texas Attorney General's Office said in its filing to the Supreme Court.

Newton, accompanied by a cousin, found the bodies April 7, 1987. Her husband had been shot in the head, the two children in the chest, all with a .25-caliber pistol.

Three weeks before the slayings, Newton took out $50,000 life insurance policies on herself, her husband and her daughter. She named herself as beneficiary and said she signed her husband's name to prevent him from discovering she had set aside money to pay for the premiums.

Prosecutors said the insurance payoff was the motive for the slayings.