The state of Texas has executed a former police officer who hired two people to kill his wife nearly 30 years ago during a heated divorce.
Robert Fratta, 65, was pronounced dead Tuesday night at 7:49 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection at Huntsville State Penitentiary.
Fratta, a former suburban Houston police officer, was found guilty of a murder-for-hire plot after prosecutors say he hired a go-between, Joseph Prystash, to hire the shooter, Howard Guidry.
Farah Fratta, 33, died after being shot twice in the head inside the garage of her home in November 1994 in Atascocita, Texas.
TEXAS TO EXECUTE FORMER POLICE OFFICER FOR HIRING 2 PEOPLE TO KILL HIS WIFE
This stock photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Robert Fratta, a former suburban Houston police officer on death row. Fratta was to be executed on Tuesday, January 10, 2023, for hiring two people to kill his estranged wife of nearly 30 years.
(Texas Department of Criminal Justice/AP)
The execution came after the US Supreme Court rejected a last-minute appeal by Fratta’s lawyers to stop the execution, arguing prosecutors withheld evidence allegedly showing investigators hypnotized a witness. The lawyers argue that the alleged hypnosis caused the witness to change her memory of the event.
“This would have undermined the case of the State, which was contingent on only two men committing the act and contingent on linking Fratta to both,” Fratta’s lawyers wrote in the appeal.
The hypnosis revealed no new information or identification, prosecutors argue, saying Fratta expressed several times that he wanted his wife dead, even asking several people if they knew someone who would kill her.
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Court records show Fratta allegedly told a friend: “I’ll just kill her, serve my time, and when I get out, I’ll have my children.”
A civil court judge in Austin, Texas, issued a temporary injunction Tuesday that would have stopped the state from using what are likely expired drugs in the lethal injection, but it was allowed to go ahead after an appeals court overturned it. the court order.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously agreed not to commute Fratta’s death sentence to a 60-day suspension or lesser sentence.
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The other two men involved in the murder-for-hire plot, Prystash and Guidry, are also on death row for their role in the murder.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
