Thank you, Commissioners, for avoiding the impulse to support a fellow judge, and standing up for decency, compassion, and common sense in the judicial profession.

In a display of arrogance, rigidity and callousness that has justly haunted her for three years, Sharon Keller, the Presiding Judge of the State Court of Criminal Appeals, told a clerk to close down the courthouse on the dot of  5:00 PM on September 5, 2007, knowing well that attorneys were rushing there to file a last-minute appeal to save a prisoner from execution. Once the doors were closed, there was nothing they could do, and their client, Michael Richard, was put to death that night.

Since 2007, Keller has fiercely defended her actions in several proceedings, finally getting one judge to rule that she did nothing worthy of reprimand. The Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, however, addressed the issue squarely and correctly after it heard an appeal of that decision last month. It reversed the decision, saying Keller failed to perform her duties, failed to maintain open access to the courts, and that her actions constituted a “willful or persistent conduct that casts public discredit on the judiciary or the administration of justice.”

She could have kept the courthouse open for a few minutes longer. She could have advised the lawyers that they could go to another judge who was in charge of last-minute appeals that day. Instead she stuck to the clock, adhering to a strict deadline she had the power to change. In the appeal, Judge Keller’s lawyers repeated the arguments she has been using since the incident. The lawyers were at fault, and should have been better organized. The lawyers should have known about the option of filing with another judge; it wasn’t her job to tell them. None of this changes the fact that the basis for the request to stay Richard’s execution (Constitutional issues surrounding lethal injections) was successful in rescuing other inmates from death, and he was robbed of his chance at life by Judge Keller’s stubborn inflexibility. Dry cleaners, banks and grocery stores show mercy when a desperate customer pleads for a few extra minutes. The fact that this delay wasn’t to get a blouse cleaned or check cashed, but to save a human life, makes Keller’s conduct as reprehensible as it is incomprehensible.

Keller has said that she was never given a reason for the lateness of the appeal, so she simply said, “We close at 5.”
“If there had been some comment about computer problems, I would have started thinking in a different direction,” Keller said in a deposition. Nonsense, says Neal Manne, a lawyer who represents the Texas Defender Service, a non-profit group that represents mostly indigent defendants in capital murder cases. Keller had no right to turn away the appeal even if there was no good explanation.

He’s right, of course. Human compassion, kindness, and adherence to principles of justice required that Judge Keller allow a few extra minutes when a life was at stake. That she didn’t and still can’t see that she should have is an embarrassment to the judicial system, and we should applaud the judges who had the integrity and honesty to say so.