Sharon Keller is Texas' Judge Dread

Keller's friends can't come up with an explanation for why she closed the clerk's office when she did, but they do try to shift some of the blame to the defense lawyers. Dan Hagood, a Dallas defense attorney who served as Keller's campaign treasurer when she first ran for the bench in 1994, says that Dow could have filed a short, handwritten motion to stay Richard's execution. It never had to come down to a last-minute filing. Hagood adds that even if the clerk's office was closed, Dow could have simply turned his motion over to any of the nine appellate justices on the court, including Keller herself.

But Dow, who has worked on 75 capital cases, says that such criticism reflects a lack of understanding of how the court works.

"I could have presented a short one-page, which would have killed a tree unnecessarily," Dow says. "These are never granted, not once in the history of Texas death-penalty law."

Within a year or two, law students across the country will be studying the legal drama that played out over the last day of Richard's life. Maybe some professors will conclude that Richard's lawyers, though scrambling to meet a very literal deadline, could have pursued other measures with the appellate court once Keller shut the clerk's office down. It could be a good, intricate lesson on the chaotic nature of Death Row appeals.

But the consequences of Keller's actions are relatively easy for anyone to understand: Closing the clerk's office created a procedural roadblock for the defense that it could not overcome. Had Keller simply kept the clerk's office open an additional 10 or so minutes to receive Richard's pleading, even if the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected it, the Supreme Court likely would have blocked his execution. How does one know that? Two days later, the Supreme Court stayed the execution of Texas inmate Carlton Turner after his lawyers raised the question first broached in the Kentucky lethal-injection case. It was nearly the same claim Richard made, only Turner was able to convince the Supreme Court justices that he exhausted his state options.

"Her behavior wasn't just outrageous to the average layperson; it is so outside the realm of judicial reasonableness," defense lawyer Levin says of Keller. "In 10 minutes, she made a unilateral decision to deny this man relief that he was completely entitled to, based on her own attitudes and moods."

In 1994, Sam Bayless, a San Antonio lawyer and graduate of Highland Park High School, attended a judicial forum at a hotel in Houston. Bayless was running for a seat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and just slipped into a runoff in the Republican primary against Keller, a well-regarded Dallas County prosecutor who worked in the district attorney's appellate division.

When the 41-year-old Keller introduced herself, she told the audience she would be a "prosecution-oriented judge." That may seem like a throwaway campaign line, but to a stickler for judicial conduct like Bayless, it was inexcusable.

"I got to thinking that I guess people don't care much about the criminal courts, because what would happen if a judge ran for a family court seat on the platform that 'I am husband-oriented or wife-oriented,'" Bayless says. "They would be hung out to dry in the press, but here it seemed to pass without notice."

Keller would go on to beat Bayless in the runoff and take on Democrat Betty Marshall in the general election. This time Keller smoothed out her position and went from promising to be a "prosecution-oriented" judge to simply a "pro-prosecution" judge.

"I guess what pro-prosecution means is seeing legal issues from the perspective of the state instead of the perspective of the defense," she told The Dallas Morning News.

Of course, Keller simply could have promised to see things from the perspective of both the prosecution and the defense, but a pledge of objectivity doesn't help you in a judicial race. Instead, Keller stuck to uttering platitudes. Sure enough, Keller easily won election to the state's highest criminal court.

Since taking the bench, Keller has clearly kept her campaign promise of being a pro-prosecution judge, often earning derision from defense attorneys if not her own colleagues. In 1996, she concluded that a defendant received a fair trial even after evidence surfaced that the man had been tortured into giving a confession. Both the prosecutor and the judge in the case called for a new trial, but Keller disagreed, concluding that although the inmate's rights were violated, it didn't affect the outcome of the trial. In 2003, Keller voted with the majority to permit the execution of a condemned inmate whose lawyer suffered from bipolar disorder and had his law license suspended three times.