In Texas, a former police officer who participated in the murder of his estranged wife almost 30 years ago for hire is scheduled to be hanged.
On Tuesday evening, Robert Alan Fratta, 65, will be given a fatal injection at the state prison in Huntsville.
On November 9, 1994, Farah, Fratta’s wife, was shot and killed in the garage of her home in the Atascocita neighbourhood of Houston. Farah was 33 years old. At the time, Fratta had taken their three kids to church sessions.
Authorities said that during a protracted divorce and custody battle, Fratta, a public safety officer for the Houston suburb of Missouri City, planned to have his wife assassinated.
According to court records, he frequently voiced his wish to see his wife killed and asked a number of friends if they knew anyone who would murder her.
Eventually, Howard Guidry, the shooter, was hired by a middleman named Joseph Prystash. Prystash and Guidry received death sentences for the murder as well.
Fratta has consistently asserted his innocence.
His defence are requesting a stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that prosecutors withheld evidence suggesting an eyewitness had been hypnotised by detectives.
That caused her to revise her earlier account of what she had seen, which was two men and a getaway driver at the murder scene.
“This would have undermined the State’s case, which depended on just two men committing the act and depended on linking Fratta to both,” they wrote in a petition.
The information “also would have provided powerful impeachment” of not only the witness testimony but also of detectives who testified at trial.
“The information finally would have allowed competent counsel to impeach the investigation conducted by the police,” Fratta’s attorneys wrote.
For additional comment, they have been approached.
The prosecution claims that the hypnosis did not result in any new knowledge or identification.
Fratta was sentenced to death, but the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously decided against commuting his sentence to life in prison or granting him a 60-day reprieve.
He is one of three death row convicts in Texas who filed a lawsuit to prevent the use of allegedly hazardous and outdated execution medications by the state’s prison system.
A judge in the civil court was prevented from issuing any orders in the lawsuit on January 4 by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. On Tuesday, at 10 a.m. CT, a hearing is scheduled.
