The Cowtown Chronicles

Well, really I think it’s more than a bit full of itself, but I do appreciate and respect its position as a(the?) premier world city.

I also LOVE the NY Times. I read it as often as I can. Lately that’s been pretty often due to the student readership program at TCU — which puts stacks of The Gray Lady in bins all over campus, free for the taking.

Imagine my surprise today when “all the news that’s fit to print” included an op-ed on Judge Sharon Keller, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge who refused to keep her clerk’s office open an extra 20 minutes to allow a death row inmate’s legal team to file new motions based on a pending Supreme Court review of lethal injection.

Okay, so what? The good, Christian, peaceful, other-cheek-turning people of Texas ritualistically kill retards and foreigners on the taxpayer’s dime all the time — why is this worthy of an opinion piece by the Editorial Board of the NY Times?

It’s news because Fort Worth State Representative Lon Burnam has filed a resolution to impeach Judge Keller for “…gross neglect of duty and conducting her official duties with willful disregard for human life.”

Good on ya, Lon, for calling for an investigation into this Judge’s actions. As the opinion piece in the Times says, if the facts of the matter are as the condemned man’s lawyers have said, then Judge Keller should be removed from office, relieved of her state retirement benefits and disbarred. (Maybe even tried for negligent homicide? I’m sure there are legal indemnifications for judges acting in their official capacity, even if they’re acting improperly.)

If the allegations are false and the attorneys just didn’t get their paperwork done in time without talking to anyone at the court, then no harm, no foul, and Judge Keller keeps her job, etc., and we can let the voters decide in 2012 if she gets to come back.

Oddly enough, I also read the S-T today. I usually stay off the opinion page, because the letters to the editor are usually so stereotypically “White Bible-Belt ‘Conservative’ Texan” as to be embarrassing for the rest of y’all. One of the letters, predictably, calls for Rep. Burnam to “…go do the job he was elected to do and let the judges run the courts.” Well, Mr. Walter Degner of Arlington, perhaps you should go back and read that trivial slip of paper called The Constitution. Each branch of government exercises some degree of oversight and control of the other — Mr. Burnam is doing EXACTLY the job he was elected to do, and should be applauded for that.