Frances Newton

Newton Executed: No reprieve from the state

Compiled from The Austin Chronicle
30th March 2008
Any news updates on this case will be listed at the foot of this item

On Wednesday 14th September 2005, Frances Newton became the third woman to die in Texas’ death chamber since executions resumed in 1982, and the first black woman to be executed in the state since the Civil War.

She was executed despite considerable evidence of prosecutorial negligence, inadequate defence, and recent documentation of evidence lost or suppressed during the original prosecution. On Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Newton’s final appeal (unanimously and without comment).

On Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-0 to deny clemency to Newton, who was convicted of the 1987 murder of her husband and two young children. The board’s refusal was echoed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the federal district court for the Southern District of Texas, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The string of refusals – and most significantly the denial of clemency by the BPP, whose authority is not limited by any rigidly defined statutory scheme – was astounding considering the gravity of new evidence that Newton’s attorneys proffered in recent weeks, which appears to support the long-standing suspicion that Houston sheriff’s investigators recovered multiple firearms in connection with the April 1987 triple murder – despite prosecutorial insistence that a single weapon was seized during the investigation.

In August, Newton’s attorney David Dow, director of the Texas Innocence Network at the University of Houston Law Center, filed an addendum to Newton’s clemency petition citing investigators’ assertions that at least two identical 25-caliber Raven Arms guns had been recovered in connection with the crime.

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