Former cop on death row is denied appeal
Ex-Missouri City police officer found guilty in 1996 of hiring someone to murder his wife
A former Missouri City police officer now on Texas death row lost out on a federal appeal Tuesday, bringing him one step closer to the death chamber.
Robert Fratta was sentenced to death by a Harris County court in 1996 after jurors found him guilty of hiring someone to murder his wife, Farah. The hitman, Joseph Prystash, paid a third man to carry out the killing, according to court records. All three ended up on death row.
Fratta has repeatedly professed his innocence in the slaying over the more than two decades he’s spent fighting the case.
“The courts are continuing to deny him justice,” said Houston attorney James Rytting, who is representing Fratta in his federal appeals.
The latest appeals include claims about whether old ballistics testing not allowed at trial could count as new evidence and arguments about whether Fratta was allowed to file his own appeals in tandem with attorneys’ filings.
The court on Tuesday night decided the ballistics evidence wasn’t new, under either of the two legal standards by which it could be measured.
“Fratta possessed the report at the time of his second trial and he presented to the court, even though it was ultimately ruled inadmissible,” the federal appeals court wrote. “Regardless, even assuming that the ballistics report was ‘new,’ that new evidence is not ‘so strong’ that it undermines our confidence in the jury’s verdict.”
After turning down the first two claims, the court did not review the remaining three.
“I think that this is a case of the court ignoring the principal claims that were raised — which are meritorious,” Rytting said.
Farah and Robert Fratta were in the midst of a contentious divorce and slated for a child custody hearing less than three weeks after the 34-year-old mother was shot in the head while stepping out of her car. Robert Fratta was at church at the time of the crime, but investigators immediately zeroed in on him as a prime suspect. Before the slaying, he’d reportedly asked around for a hit man and on the night of the murder he repeatedly retreated to the church office to make phone calls, according to authorities. Records showed those calls went to Prystash’s girlfriend, who later offered up details to police in exchange for immunity. In the end, police arrested Fratta for planning the slaying, Howard Guidry for carrying it out and Prystash for acting as middleman between the two. Prosecutors said Prystash set up the killing in exchange for a Jeep.
Although all three men were sent to death row, Guidry and Fratta both saw their initial convictions reversed and bounced back to a lower court.
Guidry is still fighting his case in state court. Prystash lost out in the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.
None of the men have execution dates set.