Receptional_Andy - 4:27 pm on Nov 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Is there any good reason why the previous coder used 3 tags which only differ in the capitalization of the word "Keyword"?

Yes - they don't know what they're doing ;)

The meta elements are (as far as I'm aware) case insensitive, so essentially that's redeclaring the same element three times. I doubt it makes any difference to the page's performance, but it's obviously best practice to remove them.

In terms of the meta keywords usage itself, there have been quite a few interesting discussions over the past few months, including Are repeated meta keywords duplicate content? [webmasterworld.com].