FRANCES NEWTON’S FINAL HOURS — THE 40-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WHO FACED EXECUTION AFTER YEARS ON TEXAS DEATH ROW

She was just hours away from execution when Frances Newton was moved from the women’s death row to Texas’s death house in Huntsville.

Newton, 40, had spent years fighting a death sentence for the 1987 shootings of her husband, Adrian Newton, 23, and their two children, Alton, 7, and Farrah, 21 months.

On the final day, her remaining appeals were rejected and the last legal avenues available to her were rapidly disappearing.

Newton was transported from the Gatesville area to Huntsville, where the Walls Unit housed Texas’s execution chamber.

By the afternoon of September 14, 2005, her lawyers were still seeking intervention from the courts and Governor Rick Perry.

But the appeals were unsuccessful.

A LAST-MINUTE REPRIEVE HAD COME BEFORE

Newton had experienced a dramatic reprieve nearly a year earlier.

In December 2004, Governor Perry postponed her execution only hours before she was scheduled to die so that additional testing could be carried out on evidence in the case.

The reprieve temporarily stopped the execution and gave Newton’s lawyers additional time to investigate questions surrounding the evidence.

By September 2005, however, that opportunity had disappeared.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously rejected her request to have the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Perry also refused another request for a delay on the day of the execution.

The U.S. Supreme Court then declined to intervene approximately an hour before Newton was scheduled to be executed.

QUESTIONS SURROUNDING THE CASE

Newton maintained her innocence throughout her appeals.

Prosecutors said she killed her family to collect life-insurance money.

Her defense challenged the prosecution’s account and raised questions about the weapon evidence, including conflicting accounts concerning whether a second gun had been recovered at the crime scene.

A later clemency petition also included claims from a prisoner who said another inmate had confessed to the killings.

The Texas courts rejected the arguments, while prosecutors maintained that ballistics evidence connected the weapon Newton had hidden to the murders.

Her lawyers also argued that her appointed trial attorneys had failed to adequately investigate important evidence and that some evidence had been improperly destroyed.

THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN EXECUTED IN TEXAS SINCE THE CIVIL WAR

Newton’s case attracted national attention in part because of its historical significance.

She became the first Black woman executed in Texas since the Civil War and only the third woman executed by Texas after capital punishment resumed in 1982.

Her execution followed the highly publicized 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker, who had been the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War.

The distinction is significant because Texas had resumed executions in 1982 following the reinstatement of the death penalty.

THE FINAL HOURS

On the afternoon of September 14, Newton was taken to the Walls Unit.

Her attorneys continued pursuing legal relief, but the Supreme Court rejected the remaining appeals.

Shortly before the scheduled execution, Newton met with one of her lawyers.

According to the attorney, she remained strong and optimistic and drew comfort from her religious faith.

At approximately 6:09 p.m., the lethal-injection drugs began flowing.

Newton did not make a final statement. When asked by the warden if she wished to speak, she quietly shook her head and said no.

She briefly turned toward her relatives watching through the witness area.

Eight minutes later, she was pronounced dead.

She was 40 years old.

Newton’s execution became another chapter in the long and contentious history of capital punishment in Texas — a case remembered not only for the crimes for which she was convicted, but also for the questions her lawyers raised about the evidence and the fairness of the process that ultimately led her to the death chamber.