Texas judge in the dock in death row case

"We close at 5:00 pm." 4 words were all it took for Texas judge Sharon Keller to extinguish the last hopes of death row inmate Michael Richard. He was executed hours later.

Scrambling to file a motion delaying his 2007 execution by lethal injection, Richard's defense lawyers say they ran into computer problems and called over to Keller's courthouse to ask it stay open a little later.

Her refusal prompted outrage, and on Monday the judge will find herself in the dock as she goes before a professional conduct panel to face claims that her decision was arbitrary and inappropriate.

The charges stem from September 25, 2007, when the US Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of death by lethal injection -- the method by which Richard was to be executed at 6:00 pm that evening.

His lawyers say they immediately began drawing up motions asking for the execution to be delayed until the Supreme Court made a decision but started having computer problems shortly before 5:00 pm.

Richard's attorneys said Keller refused keep the courthouse open, though doing so is common practice in death penalty cases. The lawyers' attempts to obtain an emergency stay from the Supreme Court was rejected because they had not first obtained a ruling on halting the execution from a lower court.

Keller's decision will be reviewed by a conduct panel presided over by Judge David Berchelman and other peers in the Texas judiciary.

It is expected to review the case for 3 or 4 days and has the power to dismiss the claims against Keller, sanction her, or remove her from the bench.

Richard, who had been convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering a woman 20 years earlier, was administered a legal injection and pronounced dead at 8:23 pm that evening.

He was the 26th person to be executed in Texas in 2007, but even in a state that accounted for around half of all executions in the United States in 2008, the case caused an outcry.

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct concluded that Keller had engaged in "willful or persistent conduct that cast public discredit on the judiciary" and multiple newspaper editorials condemned her actions.

The US Supreme Court in 1972 effectively suspended the death penalty, but it was reinstated just 4 years later and 36 states still have the punishment on their books. Polling suggests 2/3 of the population still supports executions.

Abolition activists say lethal injections, the most common method of execution in the United States, is cruel. They say the injections can take a long time to end a life, and that an anesthetic administered with the injection can sometimes fail to work, making the process very painful.

In some states, the objections have been couched in economic terms, with lawmakers and death penalty opponents noting that carrying out an execution can be 10 times more expensive than imprisoning a convict for life.

But even where economic and moral reasons have driven a legislature to approve a death penalty ban, as in Connecticut in June, there are many that remain convinced that some crimes warrant execution.

The Connecticut bill to abolish executions was vetoed by the state's Republican Governor Jodi Rell, who said "there are certain crimes so heinous, so fundamentally revolting to our humanity, that the death penalty is warranted."

In the case that prompted Richard's lawyers to seek a halt to his execution, the Supreme Court eventually upheld the constitutionality of the legal injection.

Keller has rejected any allegations of wrongdoing, saying earlier this year: "By the time he was executed, Richard had 2 trials, 2 direct appeals, 2 state habeas corpus proceedings and three federal habeas corpus hearings and motions."

Texas state legislator Lou Burnam disagreed.

"It's one thing for a banker to close shop at 5 o'clock sharp. But a public official who stands between a human being and the death chamber must be held to a higher standard."

Source: Agence France-Presse, August 16, 2009