Mary Lou Keel

Mary Lou Keel is an American attorney serving as a judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals since 2017. A member of the Republican Party, she served as a judge for the 232nd District Court from 1995 to 2017.

She ran against incumbent Larry Meyers, who was expected to lose after he switched party allegiance to become a Democrat. In the Republican primary, she ran against Collin County District Judges Chris Oldner and Ray Wheless. Keel described Wheless as 'deceptive and inaccurate." When she ran she had 31 years of criminal legal experience.

In 2012 the Texas Department of Public Safety found out that an analyst at the Houston crime lab, Jonathan Salvador, had intentionally falsified lab results, calling into question the validity of nearly 5,000 drug cases. Four hundred of those cases were in Harris Country where Keel was serving as a State District Judge. The district attorney's office requested help from the Harris County Public Defender's Office to retry hundreds of cases, but a dispute arose between Judge Keel and the public defender's office. The Houston Press reports that the dispute was about "how, or even if, public defenders were allowed to help those 400 people get new trials."

Keel was unwilling to work with the public defenders after the dispute, and between 2014 and 2016 she appointed only one public defender in her court. On this issue she has said "They think 'oh we're doing all this great work, We're gonna be the hero [...] They certainly wanted to take on all these easy cases—it makes their stats look good. If they can get a bunch of these slam-dunk writs where almost everyone's going to be granted relief, yeah, they got carried away—but not out of the goodness of their heart." The public defender's office has denied this saying "If you talk to anyone at the DA's office, they'll say they asked us to do this."