Judge defiant as trial over death-row appeal ends



By PAUL J. WEBER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Aug. 21, 2009


SAN ANTONIO — The misconduct trial of a Texas judge who refused to 
keep her court open for lawyers trying to stop an execution that 
night ended Thursday with her attorneys insisting she did nothing wrong.

Judge Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of 
Criminal Appeals, watched from her defense table while her attorney 
denounced accusations that she closed her court to death-row inmate 
Michael Wayne Richard as meritless and outrageous.

“Judge Keller didn't close the court to anybody,” said Chip Babcock, 
Keller's attorney. “Michael Richard's lawyers never knocked on the 
right doors and they gave up.”

Mocked as “Sharon Killer” by her detractors, Keller could be removed 
from the bench if the five judicial misconduct charges against her 
are upheld. At the heart of the charges is whether Keller denied 
Richard the ability to file a late appeal in the hours before his 
Sept. 25, 2007 execution.

Babcock's closing presentation, at times theatrical, was delivered as 
forcefully as Keller's unrepentant testimony earlier in the trial. He 
ended by going after those he said helped put the career of the 
state's highest criminal appeals judge in jeopardy: death-penalty 
critics.

“They don't like the way she decides death penalty cases and they 
want to get rid of her. It's pure and simple,” he said.
Keller quietly declined comment while leaving the courthouse. The 
case against her is far from over. The trial amounted to a fact-
finding hearing, and the judge who presided over it — state District 
Judge David A. Berchelmann — will now prepare a report to the state 
Commission on Judicial Conduct.

Drafting the report will likely takes weeks, if not months, and it 
will then be up to the commission to decide what, if any, punishment 
Keller will face. She could be censured, removed from the bench or 
have the charges against her dismissed.

Keller received a phone call at 4:45 p.m. the day of Richard's 
execution from a court staffer asking if the court would stay open 
past its normal closing time for Richard's lawyers, who were running 
late with an appeal.

Twice during the conversation Keller said no. She has testified that 
Richard's attorneys had other ways to file an appeal, and that she 
was simply instructing that the court close at 5 p.m. like always.

“She says ‘my role was purely administrative.' That there was no 
violation of execution-day procedures. That ‘I never made a 
decision,'” prosecuting attorney Mike McKetta said during closing 
statements. “That is not accepting accountability, your honor.”
McKetta emphasized several times that Keller “addressed and disposed” 
of the information given to her: that a last-shot appeal for a man 
scheduled to be executed within hours needed more time to get to her 
court.

“The death penalty can be accepted in a civilization only when people 
can have confidence that it be so carefully administered that it 
precludes erroneous and premature executions,” McKetta said.

Richard was executed for the brutal 1986 rape and slaying of 
Marguerite Dixon, a Houston-area nurse and mother of seven. Two of 
Dixon's daughters attended the final day of the trial in support of 
Keller, who briefly spoke with the two women when they arrived in the 
courtroom.

Paula and Marijo Dixon said Keller did her job.

“The true victim here was my mother,” Marijo Dixon said outside the 
courtroom. “No one would be here right now if he hadn't done that to 
her.”

Richard, whose family also was on hand for the trial, was twice 
convicted and failed numerous appeals. But on the morning of his 
execution, his attorneys saw a window of reprieve when the Supreme 
Court agreed to review a challenge to Kentucky's three-drug 
combination used in executions.

Texas uses a similar lethal cocktail. Richard's attorneys prepared an 
appeal on those grounds but didn't finish before Keller's court 
closed at 5 p.m. Under court rules, Richard's attorneys still could 
have filed an appeal directly with a duty judge who remained at the 
court that night.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6581243.html