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The charges focus on [Texas] Judge [Sharon] Keller’s refusal to keep court offices open past 5 p.m. on Sept. 25, 2007, to receive an appeal in the case of Michael Richard, a convicted rapist and murderer.
Judge Keller, who was first elected to the court in 1994 and campaigned as being tough on crime, left her office that afternoon to meet a repairman at her home. Mr. Richard was put to death that evening by lethal injection.
This is the same judge who once refused to grant a new trial to a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder after DNA evidence established it was not his semen in the victim. “We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” she said of the case.
