HOUSTON (AP) — A former suburban Houston police officer was set to be executed Tuesday for hiring two folks to kill his estranged spouse almost 30 years in the past.
Robert Fratta, 65, is scheduled to obtain a deadly injection for the November 1994 deadly taking pictures of his spouse, Farah, amid a contentious divorce and custody battle for his or her three youngsters.
Prosecutors say Fratta organized the murder-for-hire plot during which a intermediary, Joseph Prystash, employed the shooter, Howard Guidry. Farah Fratta, 33, was shot twice within the head by Guidry in her house’s storage within the Houston suburb of Atascocita. Robert Fratta, who was a public security officer for Missouri Metropolis, has lengthy claimed he’s harmless.
Prosecutors stated Fratta had repeatedly expressed his need to see his spouse useless and requested a number of acquaintances in the event that they knew anybody who would kill her, telling one good friend, “I’ll simply kill her, and I’ll do my time and once I get out, I’ll have my children,” in response to court docket information. Prystash and Guidry had been additionally despatched to loss of life row for the slaying.
Fratta’s attorneys have requested the U.S. Supreme Court docket to halt the execution scheduled for Tuesday night on the state penitentiary in Huntsville, arguing that prosecutors withheld proof {that a} trial witness had been hypnotized by investigators. They are saying that led her to vary her preliminary recollection that she noticed two males on the homicide scene in addition to a getaway driver.
“This is able to have undermined the State’s case, which relied on simply two males committing the act and relied on linking Fratta to each,” Fratta’s attorneys wrote of their attraction to the Supreme Court docket.
Prosecutors have argued the hypnosis produced no new info and no new identification.
The Supreme Court docket and decrease courts have beforehand rejected appeals from Fratta’s attorneys that sought to overview claims arguing inadequate proof and defective jury directions had been used to convict him. His attorneys additionally unsuccessfully argued that one juror in his case was not neutral and that ballistics proof didn’t tie him to the homicide weapon.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles final week unanimously declined to commute Fratta’s loss of life sentence to a lesser penalty or to grant a 60-day reprieve.
Fratta is also considered one of three Texas loss of life row inmates who has sued to cease the state’s jail system from utilizing what they allege are expired and unsafe execution medicine. Final week, Texas’ high felony appeals court docket barred a civil court docket choose from issuing any orders within the lawsuit. A listening to was set for Tuesday.
Fratta was first sentenced to loss of life in 1996, however his case was overturned by a federal choose who dominated that confessions from his co-conspirators shouldn’t have been admitted into proof. In the identical ruling, the choose wrote that “trial proof confirmed Fratta to be egotistical, misogynistic, and vile, with a callous need to kill his spouse.”
He was retried and resentenced to loss of life in 2009.
Andy Kahan, director of sufferer companies and advocacy for Crime Stoppers of Houston and who has helped Farah Fratta’s household through the case, stated he plans to witness the execution, holding a promise he made to Farah Fratta’s father, Lex Baquer, who died in 2018. Baquer and his spouse raised Robert and Farah Fratta’s three youngsters.
“I don’t anticipate something to return out of Bob that may present any sort of admission or any sort of regret as a result of all the things has at all times revolved round him,” Kahan stated.
The execution shall be a approach for the kids “to proceed to maneuver on with their lives and on the very least they gained’t have to consider him anymore. I feel that may play an vital half of their therapeutic,” he stated.
Fratta can be the primary inmate put to loss of life this yr in Texas and the second within the U.S. Eight different executions are scheduled in Texas for later this yr.