SAN ANTONIO — A Texas appeals court on Wednesday ordered a new trial for a Jewish man on death row — who was part of a prison gang that fatally shot a police officer in 2000 after escaping — due to bias anti-Semitism of the judge who presided over his trial.
Randy Halprin’s lawyers say former Dallas Judge Vickers Cunningham used racial slurs and anti-Semitic language to refer to him and some of his co-defendants.
Halprin, 47, was among the group of inmates known as the “Texas 7” who escaped from a South Texas prison in December 2000 and later committed numerous robberies, including one in which they shot and killed 29-year-old Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins. 11 times, killing him.
By a vote of 6-3, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that Halprin’s conviction be overturned and that he be given a new trial after finding that Cunningham was biased against him at the time. of his trial because he was Jewish.
The appeals court found that the evidence showed that throughout his life, Cunningham repeated unsubstantiated anti-Semitic narratives. When Cunningham became a judge, he continued to use derogatory language about Jewish people outside the courtroom “with ‘great hatred (and) disgust’ and increasing intensity over the years” , the court said.
He also said that during Halprin’s trial, Cunningham made offensive anti-Semitic comments outside the courtroom about Halprin in particular and Jews in general.
“The uncontradicted evidence supports the conclusion that Cunningham formed an opinion about Halprin that stemmed from an extrajudicial factor – Cunningham’s poisonous anti-Semitism,” the appeals court wrote in its decision.
The court had already suspended Halprin’s execution in 2019.
“Today, the Court of Criminal Appeals took a step toward greater confidence in criminal law by rejecting a hopelessly tainted death sentence issued by a bigoted and biased judge,” said Tivon Schardl, one of the Halprin’s lawyers, in a press release. “It also reminded Texans that religious intolerance has no place in our courts.”
The order for a new trial came after Dallas State District Judge Lela Mays said in a December 2022 ruling that Cunningham did not or could not curb the influence of his anti-Semitic bias in his judicial decision-making during the trial.
Mays wrote that Cunningham used racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs to refer to Halprin and other escaped inmates.
Cunningham left the bench in 2005 and is now an attorney in private practice in Dallas. His office said Wednesday it would not comment on Halprin’s case.
Cunningham previously denied allegations of bigotry after telling the Dallas Morning News in 2018 that he had a living trust that rewarded his children for marrying white, heterosexual Christians. He had opposed interracial marriages, but later told the newspaper that his views had evolved.
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office was appointed to handle legal matters related to Halprin’s allegations after the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, which had prosecuted the case, was disqualified.
In September 2022, Tarrant County prosecutors filed court documents in which they said Halprin should get a new trial because Cunningham had demonstrated “real bias” against him.
Of the seven inmates who escaped, one committed suicide before the group was arrested. Four were executed. Another, Patrick Murphy, awaits execution.
