RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Weds 31 October 2007 Volume 24 : Issue 88
ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.88.html>

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Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:54:11 +0100
From: Martyn Thomas
Subject: A computer-related fatality

A Texas judge, Sharon Keller, refused to keep her court open for 20 minutes to receive an appeal from the lawyers representing Michael Richard. He was executed later the same night.

His lawyers had suffered a computer breakdown and said they were unable to file the appeal within regular working hours. They had begged Judge Keller for more time and she refused.

Her decision might have gone unnoticed had the supreme court not announced, on September 25, that it was reviewing a challenge to the legality of lethal injection.

The announcement set off a flurry of appeals from death-row inmates and it is believed Richard’s execution most likely would have been halted, to await the supreme court decision, had he been granted a hearing. Two days after Richard was executed, the supreme court blocked a lethal injection in Texas. Judges in Alabama and Kentucky have also stayed executions, bringing in an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2199596,00.html

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This is disgusting! That judge should be impeached.

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