Evidence at Issue as Woman’s Execution Nears

On an April evening in 1987, Adrian Newton and his two young children were found dead in their northwest Houston apartment, all shot at close range.

The following year, Frances Newton -- 23-year-old Adrian’s wife and the mother of Alton, 7, and Farrah, 1 -- was convicted of their murders and sentenced to death. Her motivation, prosecutors said, was to collect $100,000 from life insurance policies taken out shortly before they were killed.

Newton, 39, is scheduled for execution Wednesday. She would be the third woman and the first African American woman to be put to death in Texas since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1982.

The distinction has attracted more than the usual scant attention given to executions in Texas, where 23 inmates have been put to death so far this year. But the circumstances of Newton’s conviction have also set her case apart.

During the 17 years in which Newton’s case has wound through state and federal courts, her lawyers say, the circumstantial evidence against her has never been independently examined.

Her original defense attorney, Ron Mock -- who has been suspended three times by the Texas Bar Assn. and is no longer allowed to take court-appointed capital murder cases -- interviewed no witnesses before the trial. Ballistics tests key to convicting Newton were conducted by the now-discredited Houston Police Department crime lab. Nitrite traces found on her clothing -- which could have come from a gun blast or something as common as garden fertilizer -- can now be more precisely tested to determine its source.

With her federal and state appeals all but exhausted, Newton’s lawyers petitioned the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles this month to issue a 120-day reprieve to allow for a thorough look at the evidence.

The Harris County district attorney’s office opposes a reprieve, saying her conviction has been upheld by a series of state and federal judges. “Her case has been reviewed by every possible court,” prosecutor Roe Wilson said. “She killed her two children and her husband. There is very, very strong evidence of that.”

But David Dow, Newton’s current lawyer, said that because her side of the story was never fully investigated, the courts were presented with an incomplete picture. “The issues we’re raising have never been reviewed by anybody,” he said. “It’s therefore impossible for any court to have considered the evidence of her innocence, because no one sought to gain it.”

At her trial, Newton accused a drug dealer she knew only as Charlie of killing her family in a dispute over money owed by her husband, also a dealer.

Newton was estranged from her husband at the time, living with him but dating someone else. When she found an unfamiliar gun in her home, she testified at trial, she took it out of the apartment as a safety measure. As her cousin watched, she hid it in an abandoned building next to the cousin’s home.

The gun later was traced to Newton’s boyfriend, who said he kept it in a bedroom dresser that Newton easily could have opened. Ballistics tests showed that the gun was the weapon used to shoot Adrian Newton in the head and the two children in their hearts.

Newton’s lawyers now question the validity of ballistics tests conducted by the crime lab, whose flawed analysis in recent years has been an embarrassment to the force. For instance, during another capital murder trial, a Houston police firearms expert identified the murder weapon as .25-caliber, when in fact it was an easily distinguishable .22-caliber pistol.

Newton’s lawyers want an independent lab to conduct a new ballistics test. They also question the source of the nitrite particles on the skirt Newton wore on the night of the murders.

But Wilson, the prosecutor, said additional testing wouldn’t matter in this case. “The jury was aware that fertilizer can also show a positive for nitrites” but chose to disregard it, she said.

There are other doubts. Tests conducted on Newton’s hands shortly after the killings showed she had not recently fired a gun, according to her petition to the parole board. And blood stains leading from Adrian Newton’s body in the living room to the children’s bedrooms indicated the shooter dripped blood, although no trace was found on Frances Newton, her clothes or the gun. Neither was there evidence of blood -- or a quick cleanup -- in the sinks and shower of the Newtons’ apartment, her lawyers said.

In upholding her conviction in 1992, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wrote that her explanation of events leading up to the murders was not reasonable.

“A more cold-blooded, calculated act of violence is difficult to imagine,” the judges wrote. Trial witnesses said Newton had forged her husband’s signature on insurance policies taken out a month before the murders.

As her execution date neared, Newton’s request for a reprieve was a last-ditch “ploy to get more time,” said Frank Pratt, a sheriff’s deputy who helped investigate the case in 1987.

But John LaGrappe, one of Newton’s attorneys, called it a long-delayed search for justice. “In all these years, the police, her lawyers, no one ever investigated whether she was telling the truth. This woman was abandoned by the legal system,” he said. “But if she’s lying, these tests will hang her. She should get the chance to do them so that there will be no questions.”