HOUSTON — A former Houston police officer was executed Tuesday for hiring two people to kill his wife nearly 30 years ago.
Robert Fratta, 65, was pronounced dead at 7:49 p.m. by lethal injection in Huntsville for the Nov. 1994 deadly shooting of his wife, Farah, according to The Associated Press. She was shot in the head two times in the garage of her house in Atascocita, Texas. Fratta was an officer for Missouri City.
Fratta was pronounced dead about 24 minutes after he got the pentobarbital, according to the AP. He also did not share a final statement.
Prosecutors said that Fratta had organized a murder-for-hire plot where middleman, Joseph Prystash hired the shooter, Howard Guidry, according to the AP.
The AP reported that Fratta claimed for a long time that he was innocent.
Frattas’s appeal to stop the execution was declined on Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to the AP. Fratta’s lawyers claimed that prosecutors withheld evidence in which a trial witness had been hypnotized by investigators which they say led to her changing her recollection of what she saw at the murder scene. Prosecutors reportedly said that the hypnosis had no new information or any new identification.
Fratta was one of four death row inmates in Texas that sued to stop the state’s prison system from using allegedly expired and unsafe drugs during the execution, according to the AP. The lawsuit was dismissed late Tuesday.
According to the AP, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles last week also unanimously declined to commute Fratta’s death sentence to a less penalty.
Fratta was initially sentenced to death in 1996, but that sentence was overturned by a federal judge, according to the AP. That judge reportedly ruled that Fratta’s co-conspirators’ confession should not go into evidence. He was retried and was sentenced to death again in 2009.
According to the AP, Fratta is the first inmate to be executed this year in Texas and the second in the United States.
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