A former police officer is set to be executed in Texas for his role in the murder-for-hire killing of his estranged wife almost 30 years ago.
Robert Alan Fratta, 65, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville on Tuesday evening.
Fratta's wife, Farah, 33, was shot and killed in the garage of her home in the Houston suburb of Atascocita on November 9, 1994. Fratta had taken their three children to church classes at the time.
Prosecutors said Fratta, who was a public safety officer for the Houston suburb of Missouri City, arranged to have his wife killed amid a prolonged divorce and custody fight.
He repeatedly expressed his desire to see his wife dead and asked several acquaintances if they knew anyone who would kill her, according to court documents.
Eventually a middleman, Joseph Prystash, hired the shooter, Howard Guidry. Both Prystash and Guidry were also sentenced to death for the slaying.
Fratta has long claimed he is innocent.
His attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution, arguing that prosecutors withheld evidence that a witness was hypnotized by investigators.
That led her to change her initial recollection that she saw two men at the murder scene along with a getaway driver.
"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.
They have been contacted for further comment.
Prosecutors have argued the hypnosis produced no new information and no new identification.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously declined to commute Fratta's death sentence to a lesser penalty or to grant a 60-day reprieve.
He is one of three inmates on Texas death row who sued to stop the state's prison system from using what they allege are expired and unsafe execution drugs.
On January 4, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals barred a civil court judge from issuing any orders in the lawsuit. A hearing is set for 10 a.m. CT on Tuesday.
"All lethal injection drugs are within their use dates and have been appropriately tested," Robert Hurst, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, told Newsweek.
Fratta was initially sentenced to death in 1996 but his case was overturned by a federal judge who ruled that confessions from his co-conspirators should not have been admitted into evidence. He was tried again in 2009 and resentenced to death.
If Fratta's execution goes ahead as planned, he will be the second inmate put to death in the U.S. in 2023 and the first in Texas.
Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin on January 3 in what is thought to have been the nation's first execution of a transgender person.
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