A Texas appeals court ordered a new trial Wednesday for a Jewish man on death row because of antisemitic bias by the judge who presided over his case, per the . By a vote of 6-3, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that Randy Halprin's conviction be overturned and that he be given a new trial after concluding 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 a group of inmates who escaped from a South Texas prison in December 2000 and committed numerous robberies, including one in which they fatally shot 29-year-old police officer Aubrey Hawkins in Irving.
The appeals court found evidence that showed the former judge had voiced antisemitic narratives for years. 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. It also said that during Halprin's trial, Cunningham made antisemitic remarks outside the courtroom about Halprin in particular and Jews in general.
"The uncontradicted evidence supports a finding that Cunningham formed an opinion about Halprin that derived from an extrajudicial factor—Cunningham's poisonous antisemitism," the appeals court wrote in its ruling. Cunningham stepped down from the bench in 2005 and is now an attorney in private practice in Dallas. His office said he would not be .
