Twenty Texas lawyers have joined in a complaint to be filed with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct against Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller for closing the CCA clerk’s office at 5 p.m. on Sept. 25, preventing an inmate’s attorneys from filing an emergency request to stay his execution.
Within hours after the CCA closed its doors, the state executed Michael Richard for a 1986 murder. The U.S. Supreme Court had agreed earlier on the day that Richard was executed to consider a Kentucky case, Baze v. Rees, regarding whether the lethal injection method of execution constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
