Newton was born in 1965 and lived in Harris County, Texas. On April 7, 1987 her husband Adrian, twenty-three, her son Alton, seven, and her daughter Farrah, twenty-one months, were shot dead at their apartment. She had taken out life insurance policies on all three weeks earlier, and she led police to a handgun hidden in an abandoned house. She was arrested on April 22, 1987.
The prosecution's case was insurance and a failing marriage. Her account was that her husband dealt drugs, that he owed money, and that she had hidden the gun because it was his and she panicked.
Her trial counsel was Ron Mock, a Houston lawyer whose clients accounted for a substantial share of Texas's death row and who was later disbarred; he called no witnesses in mitigation and did not investigate the drug-debt account. Her appellate lawyers argued that a second gun of the same calibre existed and had never been tested, that the nitrite residue on her skirt was consistent with contact with fertiliser rather than gunfire, and that the state's ballistic work had been done by a laboratory later engulfed in scandal. The Houston police crime lab was shut for reinvestigation in 2002 and thousands of cases were reviewed.
She was granted a 120-day reprieve by Governor Rick Perry in 2004 to allow testing. The testing that followed was limited and did not resolve the disputed items; the state maintained the results were inconclusive and the defence maintained the key evidence had never been examined at all.
She was executed by lethal injection on September 14, 2005, aged forty, having maintained her innocence for eighteen years. She was the first Black woman put to death in Texas since 1858 and the third woman executed there since 1976.
The entry records the conviction and the unresolved questions together. This is not a case in which innocence has been established; it is one in which serious evidentiary doubts were raised, were not resolved, and the execution went ahead anyway.