Ethics Report Pages Fell Out While Being Copied, Keller’s Lawyer Says

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller has come up with a fairly novel excuse for repeatedly violating state campaign finance law in the wake of the furor that has surrounded her in the last few days.

It all began when Keller filed a reply to charges that she violated the state’s judicial conduct canon from the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct. In the reply, Keller told the commission that the cost of her defense could ruin her and that the state should pick up the tab. Keller failed to tell the Commission that she’s a millionaire hamburger joint heiress, though, and watchdog groups jumped on it, noting that Keller had failed to disclose the full scope of her wealth to the Texas Ethics Commission:

A liberal watchdog group had filed ethics and criminal complaints against Presiding Judge Sharon Keller after reports that she did not disclose property that The Dallas Morning News reported is worth nearly $2 million.

Texans for Public Justice filed the complaints in Austin against Keller, a Republican, with the Texas Ethics Commission and Travis County attorney’s office.

Keller, of course, has a pretty novel excuse for how she managed to misreport her holdings for more than six years. It is kind of like “the dog ate my homework.” See for yourself, via Texas Lawyer’s Tex Parte:

When Keller had a previous year’s report recopied, two pages listing those holding[s] 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.

Keeping in mind that we’ve not had that improbable of an explanation for missing material since Rosemary Woods took the blame for erasing a key Watergate tape, one must wonder exactly how Keller was preparing her annual financial disclosure statements.

Was she actually just putting the previous year’s report on a xerox machine and not changing it, or just relying on old copies? Either way, at some point in preparing the report, how did she not realize that she was somehow omitting some of her most significant holdings? Is Keller that careless?

All of this, of course, begs the question: when will Sharon Keller resign and end this drama? To date, it is like watching an episode of “One Life To Live” mixed with “The Practice” juxtaposed with “Unsolved Mysteries.”

It isn’t that we wouldn’t love to hear Keller (and her fellow justices) under oath airing out all of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ dirty laundry in public. There is no doubt it would be fantastic political theatre. After all, we already know that some of her colleagues are ready for this entire taudry episode to be over, so we can only imagine how many knives her colleagues might leave in her back before it is all said and done.

But what does this do for justice in Texas? Precious little. The Court of Criminal Appeals is already one of the least regarded state appellate tribunals in America–if not one of the least regarded courts in the entire civilized world. A month-long multi-million dollar Judicial Conduct Commission extravaganza of a public tribunal will not do anything to salvage the court’s reputation. When will Keller realize that it is time to do what is best for the Court and for Texas and step down?

Related posts:

1. Keller Fined $100K By Texas Ethics Commission
2. As Conflict In State’s Highest Criminal Court Boils Over To Front Pages, Further Evidence Of Dissatisfaction With Keller Becomes Public
3. “The People’s Lawyer” Is Laid To Rest
4. Angry Leo Berman Tells Chinese American Lawyer To Go Back To China And “Kiss My Ass”
5. Texas School Finance & Tax Reform Reaches Pages Of The New York Times