Sharon Keller is Texas' Judge Dread

But this time the clerk told Richard's paralegal the court closed at 5 p.m. At 5:10, with his computer problems resolved, Dow finished his pleading. He says he figured the court would take it. The paralegal called the clerk a second time and was told that the court wouldn't accept their filing. As it turns out, Keller instructed the clerk that the court was closed, according to her own account in the Austin American-Statesman. (Keller did not return repeated calls from the Dallas Observer to her office and home.)

Keller's explanation to the Statesman is disingenuous at best. Richard's pleadings weren't about a misdemeanor DWI. They were an attempt to stay an execution. She knew that. She also knew that the Supreme Court decision earlier in the morning opened up an avenue for Richard to stay his execution.

The judge also knew her own court's policies at the time. They stated that all communication about an imminent execution should go to the judge assigned to handle last-minute motions on the case. With Richard, that would have been Judge Cheryl Johnson. But Johnson, a Republican jurist whom no one will accuse of being sympathetic to defense lawyers, told the Statesman that Keller never asked her if she would have reviewed Richard's pleadings, even though she was ready to work late that evening.

"I was angry. If I'm in charge of an execution, I ought to have known about those things, and I ought to have been asked whether I was willing to stay late and accept those filings," Johnson told the paper.

Asked if she would have accepted Richard's brief, she replied, "Sure. I mean, this is a death case."

People who've worked at the Court of Criminal Appeals will tell you that on the day of an execution, it's not business as usual. Judges and clerks are ready for just about everything.

"People turned out the lights and went home on normal days, but on days when it was apparent that a last-minute pleading was coming in on an execution, there was no formal closing time," says Richard Wetzel, who worked as general counsel for the court from 1987 to 2003. "The door might be locked, but court staff and judges were available to process last-minute requests."

In fact, the culture of capital punishment is rife with drama until the moment an inmate is declared dead. A little more than 10 years ago, executions in Texas were held between midnight and sunrise. Wetzel remembers pleadings coming in almost at dawn, when it wasn't entirely clear whether lawyers had beaten the clock.

"I remember when officials at the penitentiary would pull out the almanac and determine the official time of sunrise," Wetzel says.

After they realized they weren't going to be able to file their pleadings with the Court of Criminal Appeals, Richard's lawyers hurried to explore all other ways they could save their client. They asked the governor's office for a stay of execution and were rejected. They also filed one last appeal before the Supreme Court. At 7:30 p.m., the Supreme Court denied Richard's appeal. By 8:23 p.m., he was dead.

Harris County Prosecutor Lynn Hardaway, who handled the state's litigation on the Richard case, says that Dow, Richard's lead lawyer, can't complain about how the Court of Criminal Appeals handled the case. Ultimately, it was the Supreme Court that denied his client a stay of execution.

"He was able to present his motion for a stay of execution with the United States Supreme Court, and he was denied," Hardaway says. "It wasn't like no one heard his request."

But Dow says that in his appeal before the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General's Office seized on the fact that he did not file anything that day with the Court of Criminal Appeals. The attorney general argued that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear Richard's appeal because nothing had been filed in or ruled on by the state's highest criminal court.

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.

"I feel like this is a case where the facts are being bent to blame a judge instead of a lawyer," Hagood says.

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.