Texas judge cultivates reputation for being tough on crime in busiest death penalty state

AUSTIN, Texas -- The path to the nation's busiest death chamber winds through a court of last resort where the presiding judge recently refused to keep her office open past 5 p.m. to accept a last-minute appeal from an inmate about to be executed.

Judge Sharon Keller's relentless tough-on-crime approach earned her the nickname "Killer Keller," and condemned prisoners in Texas know she is unlikely to spare them from a lethal injection.

Keller, 54, cultivates her reputation, distributing campaign literature showing a shadowy figure behind bars and the headline: "He won't be voting for Judge Sharon Keller."

Keller is "clearly not the friend of the criminal defendant, and she is active and aggressive in espousing her view of the law, which is very often -- almost always -- very pleasing to the prosecutors and not to the defense lawyers," said John Wright, a Huntsville defense attorney who has represented death-row clients before the state Court of Criminal Appeals.

On the night Keller refused to keep the court open, Michael Richard's lawyers had asked to file a last-minute appeal. They appealed through the federal system instead, and the Supreme Court turned down his case. Richard was put to death at 9:30 p.m. Sept. 25 for the rape and murder of a Houston-area woman.

Just hours earlier, the high court had agreed to review the constitutionality of lethal injection. Richard, 49, is the only person in the nation to have been executed since that day.

After Richard's execution, conservatives praised the judge for treating Richard like the killer he was. Civil rights activists vilified her as a cold-blooded jurist who denied a condemned man a final appeal.

Keller, who declined requests for an interview, was elected as a Republican to the Court of Criminal Appeals in 1994.

In 1998, she and four other judges on the court refused to grant a retrial to a man sentenced to 99 years for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl. DNA tests determined that semen found on the victim did not belong to Roy Criner.

In her opinion, she speculated that the absence of Criner's semen may signal "a failure to ejaculate ... or it may establish a condom was used." Keller also noted that the victim was promiscuous.

"You could not deal with them on arguments that made any sense," said Mike Charlton, who represented Criner and is now an assistant federal defender in Nevada.

"If you're a criminal defense attorney in Texas, you expect to lose a majority of cases. But there are some cases that you're supposed to win, and the Roy Criner case is one of those cases. He was so obviously innocent."

Gov. George W. Bush pardoned Criner in 2000.

In the Criner case "there were a lot of issues that went back and forth," said Rob Kepple, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. "She came down on one side of it, but it was a principled answer ... she's very intellectually honest."