Lawyer Chastises Supreme Court for Allowing TX Execution
A lawyer for the inmate executed after a Texas judge would not keep the courthouse doors open for his emergency petition says many people share the blame “for this preventable travesty.”
Those who looked the other way include the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, writes University of Houston law professor David Dow in an opinion column for the Washington Post.
Sharon Keller, chief judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, refused to accept the late filing on behalf of Michael Richard asserting that the state’s lethal injection method was unconstitutional. But the Texas attorney general and governor also knew of the planned appeal, which cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s September decision to hear another lethal injection challenge in a Kentucky case. The Texas officials—and the U.S. Supreme Court—did nothing, Dow says.
“Judge Keller’s decision, effectively consigning Michael Richard to death, was reprehensible,” Dow wrote. “But it was also typical of the arbitrariness and brazen disregard for legal principle that characterizes most death penalty cases. Since the Supreme Court set this moratorium in motion with its announcement in September, nearly all of the more than 3,000 death row inmates in America have had their lives extended—all, that is, except one.”
