A Texas death row inmate was granted a new trial on Wednesday due to the sentencing judge's anti-Semitic bias against him. Randy Halprin, who was part of the "Texas 7" gang of escaped prisoners, had already won a reprieve from the death penalty in 2019.
Now an appeals court granted the new trial altogether as a result of the violation of due process, arguing there was "such a high degree of antagonism as to make fair judgement impossible." Halprin's lawyers detailed that Judge Vickers Cunningham used racial slurs and antisemitic language to refer to him and some of his co-defendants.
"Specifically, we find that Halprin has shown by the preponderance of the evidence that his trial judge was actually biased against him at the time of the trial because Halprin is Jewish," the court wrote in a passage of its opinion. Outside the courtroom, the appeals court added, the judge referred to him as "the Jew," "Randy the Jew" and "the Jew Halprin." The statements were only made public after the conviction.
The court voted 6-3 to overturn the trial and he be given a new one as a result, recalling that the judge repeated unsupported antisemitic narratives during his life and, once he became a judge, continued to use derogatory language about Jewish people outside the courtroom. He did so with "'great hatred, (and) disgust' and increasing intensity as the years passed."
Halprin was serving a 30-year prison sentence in 2000 when he escaped his Texas prison along with six other inmates. They ended up in Irving and robbed a sporting goods store on Christmas Eve. A police officer who was nearby got a call to investigate a "suspicious circumstance" at the store. When driving there he saw the seven men exiting the building. He was shot at 11 times before the men fled, triggering a nationwide manhunt.
Harris was subsequently apprehended and sentenced to death in 2003 under the state's law of parties, which holds a person criminally responsible for the actions of another if they are engaged in a conspiracy. Halprin says he never fired a weapon at the police officer.
Over 20 years later, he will get another trial. "Today, the Court of Criminal Appeals took a step towards broader trust in the criminal law by throwing out a hopelessly tainted death judgment handed down by a bigoted and biased judge," said Tivon Schardl, Halprin's attorney.
Schardl added that since Halprin returned to prison he has "shown over his two decades on death row that he is a man of peace with a deep connection to God. He is a member of the faith-based program on death row, where he continues his spiritual and moral growth and supports his Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist brothers on their journeys." A date for his new trial has not been set yet.
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