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By Associated PressFrances Newton was the first black woman put to death since Texas resumed executions in 1982.
HUNTSVILLE, Texas - Frances Newton was executed Wednesday for the fatal shootings of her husband and two children 18 years ago, becoming the third woman, and first black woman, to be put to death in the state since executions resumed in 1982.
Strapped to the death chamber gurney and with her parents among the people watching, Newton, 40, declined to make a final statement.
About three dozen demonstrators chanted outside, a smaller crowd than the one that gathered in 1998 to protest the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War.
Without dissent, the Texas Supreme Court declined two appeals about an hour before Newton was scheduled to be taken to the Texas death chamber.
Newton didn't deny putting a gun in her 7-year-old son's knapsack and stashing the bag at an abandoned house. But she and her lawyers said the .25-caliber blue steel revolver she hid was not the one used to fatally shoot her son, Alton; her 21-month-old daughter, Farrah; and her husband, Adrian, 23, at their Houston apartment.
However, repeated ballistics tests confirmed the gun she hid was the murder weapon, and no second gun was found, prosecutors said.
"The unbroken chain of custody directly links Newton to the murder weapon," the Texas Attorney General's Office said in its filing to the Supreme Court.
Three weeks before the slayings, Newton took out $50,000 life insurance policies on herself, her husband and her daughter. She named herself as beneficiary.