For more than 15 years on death row, Randy Halprin filed challenge after challenge to his sentence. The denials began to stack up.
Finally, on Friday, one of his appeals persuaded Texas’ highest court to stay his execution, which had been scheduled for Oct. 10. Mr. Halprin’s lawyers had found several people who said that the judge who oversaw their client’s murder conviction had regularly used racist language and referred to Mr. Halprin, who is Jewish, using anti-Semitic slurs.
The lawyers had been spurred to investigate the judge, Vickers Cunningham, by an explosive report in
The Dallas Morning News last year saying that he had promised to reward his children if they married a white, Christian person of the opposite sex. The report
sank the judge’s campaign for Dallas County commissioner.
Now, a trial court will determine whether Judge Cunningham’s reported views and behavior warrant a new trial for Mr. Halprin.
“The ruling is a very strong signal that the court is not going to tolerate bigotry in criminal courts in Texas,” said Tivon Schardl, one of Mr. Halprin’s lawyers.
The decision from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is just the latest twist in the sentencing of a group of defendants known as the Texas Seven, four of whom have been executed. Mr. Halprin and six other men carried out a string of robberies after escaping from prison in December 2000. During their last holdup, they were confronted by Officer Aubrey Hawkins, and several men opened fire, killing the officer and dragging him with a car.
Mr. Halprin has always said he did not fire a gun; at trial he told a jury that he had not wanted to carry a gun and “freaked out” when the other men began shooting. His lawyers have argued that their client was at the bottom of the Texas Seven hierarchy.
But Mr. Halprin was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 under a
fiercely debated Texas
statute known as the law of parties, which allows accomplices to be punished as if they had been the ones to pull the trigger. The only other living member of the escapees, Patrick Murphy, had his execution
temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court in March