In this paper, we consider a time-fractional reaction-diffusion system with the same nonlinearities of the Newton-Leipnik chaotic system. Through analytical tools and numerical results, we derive sufficient conditions for the asymptotic stability of the proposed model and show the existence of chaos. We also propose a nonlinear synchronization controller for a pair of systems and establish the local and global asymptotic convergence of the trajectories by means of fractional stability theory and the Lyapunov method.