A Texas appeals court ordered a new trial Wednesday for a Jewish man on death row - who was part of a gang of prisoners that fatally shot a police officer in 2000 after escaping - because of antisemitic bias by the judge who presided over his case.
Lawyers for Randy Halprin have contended that former Judge Vickers Cunningham in Dallas used racial slurs and antisemitic 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 then committed numerous robberies, including the one in which they shot 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 concluding that Cunningham was biased against him at the time of his trial because he is Jewish.
The appeals court found evidence showed that during his life, Cunningham repeated unsupported antisemitic 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 as the years passed," the court said.