Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller alleges in her answer to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct’s Notice of Formal Proceedings that she never was told that Michael Richard’s attorneys were having computer problems that delayed them in filing for a stay of execution on Sept. 25, 2007, the day Richard was executed.
But Keller, a CCA judge since 1994 and the court’s presiding judge since 2000, alleges in the March 24 answer she filed with the commission that Richard’s attorneys at the Texas Defender Service (TDS) did not need a computer to prepare and timely file a motion for stay after the U.S. Supreme Court granted a petition for a writ of certiorari in Baze v. Rees to determine whether the chemicals used in Kentucky’s lethal injection method of execution constituted cruel and unusual punishment — an issue Richard sought to raise with the CCA. Keller contends in the answer that Richard could have hand-written a motion for stay and the court would have accepted it, or he could have filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus in the trial court. [See Keller's answer.]
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