US executes woman as pleas for clemency fail

A woman convicted of killing her family has become the first black female to be executed in Texas since the US Civil War.

Frances Newton (40) died by lethal injection for the April 1987 shooting of her husband and two children - despite last-minute legal and political pleas.

Prosecutors said the motive was $100,000 in life insurance, but Newton blamed the killings on an unknown drug dealer.

The main evidence against Newton was repeated ballistics testing of a pistol she hid under a house that showed the gun was used to kill her family. Gunpowder residue was also found on her skirt.

But Newton's lawyers disputed the gunpowder tests, saying the residue also could have come from common garden fertiliser. They also claimed police found another weapon in the abandoned house, clouding whether the one she hid was the murder weapon.

Newton was the 13th person executed in Texas this year.

The state has nine more executions scheduled so far for 2005, including six in November.

The US Supreme Court denied two late appeals yesterday, clearing the way for the lethal injection.

"For a long time I believed in the death penalty. But now I know that the system can't be trusted to be right. I've been wrongly accused, wrongly convicted," Newton told the Houston Chroniclein an interview.