Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller (pictured) is not having a good week. On Monday, March 30, The Dallas Morning News published an article claiming public records show Keller failed to disclose $2 million in real estate assets as required by state law. On Tuesday, March 31, Texans for Public Justice, an Austin-based nonprofit watchdog organization, filed a complaint against Keller with the Texas Ethics Commission and sent a complaint letter about her to the Travis County Attorney David Escamillia. Previously, Keller had asked the state to pay her legal bills in a unrelated proceeding against her before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. In that action, the Notice of Formal Proceedings alleges Keller violated her duties in the death penalty proceedings involving Michael Richard, who was subsequently executed. In her answer to the notice, Keller denied all the charges. TPJ's ethics commission complaint alleges Keller violated state law by omitting information from her required financial disclosures. In the complaint letter to the Travis county attorney, TJP asks the prosecutor to investigate Keller's alleged lack of disclosure and "take all appropriate steps." Charles "Chip" Babcock, a partner in the Houston office of Jackson & Walker, who is representing Keller, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
-- Miriam Rozen
UPDATE: Babcock returned my call after I posted this blog. He says that he "certainly didn't know the extent of [Judge Keller's] holdings" before agreeing to represent her and that he had not asked to see her holdings at that time. He says Ed Shack, an Austin solo, is representing Keller before the Texas Ethics Commission. Shack says he has agreed, as a friend, to represent Keller and he declines to comment on the compensation arrangements. Shack says Keller will file "a full and corrected financial disclosure report" with the commission as soon as possible. "We want to get it right," Shack says. He says two of Keller's real estate holdings inadvertently were omitted from previous filings because of a simple error. When Keller had a previous year's report recopied, two pages listing those holding fell out of the stack; since that happened in 2002, those pages have not been replaced, Stack says. Keller is now checking with her father and her father's lawyer, Shack says, to make sure no other additional holdings mistakenly have not been reported. Babcock says regardless of whether Keller is rich or poor, she deserves the right to have representation before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct and to make her own arrangements, if possible, for discounting the costs of that lawyering.
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