I’ll say this for Sharon Keller. She is steadfast in her beliefs, and there is nothing you can say to her to make her waver from them.
The presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals who refused to keep open the clerk’s office before a last-minute death row appeal could be filed told a crowded courtroom Wednesday she would do nothing different if presented again with a similar request.
“Yes, that is correct,” Judge Sharon Keller said from the witness stand when asked if she would respond the same as Sept. 25, 2007, the day death row inmate Michael Richard was executed after being denied a request to file an appeal after 5 p.m.
Immediately after her answer, special prosecutor Mike McKetta said, “Pass the witness.”
That’s pretty much where we started with all this, isn’t it? Keller thinks she’s done nothing wrong, she’d do the same thing tomorrow, and who cares what the rest of us think? Well, it does matter what the State Commission on Judicial Conduct thinks, and it seems she recognizes that. But don’t expect anything but the same ol’ Sharon if they let her off, because as far as she’s concerned she’s got no lesson to learn. Grits noticed the same thing, and says this is exactly why the Commission should remove her from the bench. I’ll say again, I like my judges to have a healthy dollop of self-doubt and introspection in them. Take that out, and what you get is, well, Sharon Keller, who thinks she can do no wrong. She’s wrong about that, and I agree with Grits.
One of the things that came out of yesterday’s testimony was an admission by Ed Marty, the former general counsel for the Court of Criminal Appeals, that he couldn’t really remember if he’d mentioned the phone call asking for the clerk’s office to stay open late to CCA Judge Cheryl Johnson, the assigned judge for Michael Richard’s execution. That contradicted earlier testimony cited by the defense. I thought this bit was rather poignant:
After Keller finished testifying Wednesday, prosecutors played a taped deposition from Marty before resting their case.
When asked if there was anything he would have done differently about the conversation, Marty said he had hoped Keller would agree to let the clerk accept the filing late, but once he received her answer, he felt there was nothing more he could do. He wasn’t allowed to contact litigants unless they called him, he said, and the chain of command prevented him from approaching another judge.
“I regret that I didn’t really know how to advise Judge Keller,” he said, adding that he still isn’t sure what he could have done once she gave an answer.
Since then, the only solution he’s been able to come up with is to have placed emphasis on the word “clerk” when relaying the message to deputy clerk Abel Acosta that “the clerk’s office closes at 5.” The emphasis, he said, might have been “a hint to (Richard’s attorneys) that that’s magic language.”
Yeah, well, as we know several things about the court’s procedures have changed since this incident, such as actually writing them down rather than relying on oral tradition or osmosis. Clearly, the procedures had to change because we know Sharon Keller never will.
Other items of interest:
More from Keller’s testimony in the Focal Point blog: Part One, in which we learn that Keller expected court personnel to know what to do regardless of whether or not they’d actually been formally told what to do; Part Two, in which Keller explains that her claims of judicial immunity in a suit filed by Richard’s wife don’t mean she was making a judicial ruling when she told Marty to reject the late filing (more on that at Tex Parte); and Part Three, in which we get into the “I’d do nothing different” stuff. Keller also responded to questions from her attorney, Chip Babcock; you can read more about that in the Statesman story and in this last Focal Point post, in which we learn once again that Keller and Johnson are so not BFFs. The defense will call two witnesses today, at which point it should be all over but for closing arguments. The Contrarian has more.
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