Parole Board Is Asked to Amend Death Sentence

Lawyers for Frances Newton, scheduled to be executed Sept. 14 for the murders of her husband and two children, on Wednesday asked the Texas parole board to commute her sentence, saying new information cast doubt on the credibility of the investigation that led to her 1988 conviction.

Similar assertions filed earlier this summer with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals were rejected Wednesday, with the panel deciding the new evidence was not compelling enough for the court to intervene.

Prosecutors accused Newton, now 40, of shooting her family -- Adrian, 23; Alton, 7; and Farrah, 1 -- to collect $100,000 in insurance benefits. She maintained that a drug dealer she knew only as Charlie committed the murders in a dispute over money owed by her husband, also a dealer.

In a petition filed with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, Newton’s lawyer asserts that on the night of the murders, police recovered two guns -- not just the one Newton had access to -- and that Newton’s defense team was never told about it.

In a recent television interview, Harris County Assistant Dist. Atty. Roe Wilson acknowledged the existence of two guns, said David Dow, Newton’s lawyer and a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

During the TV interview, which Dow has on tape, Wilson dismissed the relevance of the second gun because it hadn’t been fired and was not involved in the crime.

However, in a court document filed in response to assertions about a second weapon, Wilson apologized for a “mistaken statement,” explaining that she meant to say that police recovered ammunition, not a gun, from the murder scene. Wilson also said she had “no recollection of making the erroneous statement.”

Newton’s clemency petition contains an affidavit from a Texas prisoner who said another inmate told him that he committed the murders; and statements from several jurors who said Newton should not be executed in light of questions they now had about the case.

Last December, just hours before she was to have been put to death, Texas Gov. Rick Perry granted an unusual reprieve so that additional testing could be done on evidence that helped to convict her.

But a skirt Newton wore on the night of the murders was found to be unfit for testing because it had been stored in a box of clothes recovered from one of the murder victims.

New ballistics analysis on the gun believed to be the murder weapon did not clear Newton. But her attorney said that news of the second gun calls into question the relevance of those ballistics tests.

If executed, Newton would be the third woman and the first African American woman put to death in Texas since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1982.