A former police officer in Houston, Texas was executed earlier this week for his role in the death of his estranged wife 28 years ago. Prosecutors accused him of hiring two people to kill his wife during a bitter divorce and custody battle. He was convicted for the 1994 murder.
Sixty-five-year-old Robert Fratta received a lethal injection at the Huntsville State Penitentiary. Fratta was pronounced dead just before 7:50 pm on January 10, about 24 minutes after the lethal dose of pentobarbital, a powerful sedative, was administered into his veins.
Just before the drugs were administrated, the warden asked Fratta if he had any last word, to which he replied, “no.”
According to prosecutors, the prisoner organized the murder plot and sought the services of a middleman, Joseph Prystash, who hired Howard Guidry, the shooter.
Farah Fratta, who was 33 at the time of the murder, was killed in the garage of her home in Atascocita, a suburb of Houston. She received two gunshots to her head. Her husband, Robert Fratta, who at the time was a police officer in Missouri City, denied his involvement in Farah’s murder.
The execution was delayed by more than an hour as last-minute appeals seeking the scrapping of the death penalty in the case were cleared by the US Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and the Texas Court of Appeals.
In their attempt to keep Fratta alive, his lawyers argued that prosecutors withheld information that a witness had been hypnotized, which led her to change her original recollection of events, claiming that she saw two men at the scene and a getaway driver.
According to prosecutors, the hypnosis produced no new information or identification. They also argued that Fratta had expressed his desire for his wife’s death to several acquaintances and asked them if they knew anyone who could do the job. Fratta told one of his friends that he would kill her, do his time, and get his kids when he got out of prison.
The two other men, Prystash and Guidry, were also convicted of the killing and sent to death row.
Fratta’s lawyers tried to stop the state prison from executing prisoners by suing them for using what they claimed were expired drugs that were unsafe. A judge ruled in favor of the state on Tuesday, January 10.
Fratta received his first death sentence in 1996, but a federal judge overturned the conviction a few years later. In 2009, Fratta was retried and resentenced to death.
