The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed to accept emergency e-mail appeals in death row cases. The decision comes weeks after an inmate was executed because a judge refused to allow the clerk's office to accept an appeal after 5 p.m.
About 300 Texas defense attorneys — including two former Texas Supreme Court justices and two former Court of Appeals justices — had filed a petition asking the court to allow the electronic appeals after the Sept. 25 execution of Michael Richard.
Richard was executed hours after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of lethal injections in a Kentucky case.
Richard's attorneys scrambled to file an appeal based on the high court's decision, but they were slowed by a computer problem. One attorney called the court to ask for an extra 20 minutes to get the appeal to the court's offices, but presiding Judge Sharon Keller refused to allow the office to stay open past 5 p.m.
Meanwhile, other judges on the nine-member court waited after 5 p.m. because they were expecting the Richard's case to be appealed based on the Supreme Court's decision.
Richard, 49, was executed later that evening. He is the only person in the country to have been executed since the Supreme Court decided to consider the Kentucky case.
"It certainly begs the question, of course, why, if they can do this so fast — within two weeks after we asked them to do it — they didn't do it earlier," said Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. "It underscores the fact that Richard would still be alive if they had done it earlier."
Under the rules adopted Tuesday, attorneys still must bring the printed petition to the court by 9:30 a.m. the next day. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had been one of the few in the nation that did not accept filings electronically.
Prosecutors in Texas' Harris and Bell counties said last month they will forego asking for execution dates until the high court decides on lethal injection procedures in the Kentucky case. Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza said he has already asked a judge to cancel a Jan. 24 execution.
In 2007, 26 of the nation's 42 executions have been in Texas. No other state has had more than three this year.
From NPR reports and The Associated Press
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