In a landmark decision on Wednesday, a Texas appeals court ordered a new trial for Randy Halprin, a Jewish death row inmate, citing antisemitic bias by the judge who oversaw his original case. Halprin, 47, was one of the “Texas 7,” a group of inmates who escaped from a South Texas prison in 2000, later committing a series of crimes, including the fatal shooting of a police officer.
In the December 2000 escape, Halprin and six other inmates evaded capture for weeks before carrying out several robberies, culminating in the killing of Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins, 29, who was shot 11 times.
Halprin’s attorneys argued that Vickers Cunningham, the former Dallas judge who presided over the trial, had used antisemitic slurs and racial epithets when referring to Halprin and other defendants.
Appeals court orders new trial for Texas death row prisoner Randy Halprin over judge’s antisemitic bias. https://t.co/5yqlUFaq9m @AP @juanlozano70 @TexDefender @TCADPdotORG
— Robert Dunham (@RDunhamDP) November 7, 2024
The appeals court, which halted Halprin’s execution in 2019, found substantial evidence that Vickers Cunningham had a long history of embracing unfounded antisemitic stereotypes. According to the court’s findings, Cunningham frequently used disparaging language about Jewish people, with his expressions of “great hatred, (and) disgust” intensifying over the years.
During Halprin’s trial, the court noted, Cunningham’s offensive remarks specifically targeted both Halprin and the Jewish community. These statements, made outside the courtroom, underscored the depth of his prejudice and raised serious questions about the impartiality of Halprin’s trial.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled 6-3 in favor of overturning Halprin’s conviction, determining that Cunningham’s prejudice had compromised the fairness of the trial. The court’s decision sets the stage for a new trial and underscores concerns about bias in the judicial system, especially in capital punishment cases.
“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.
The ACLU released a few Vickers Cunningham antisemitic pearls that had been recorded during Halprin’s trial, including “A goddamn Kike,” and “That [expletive] Jew.”
Amanda Tackett, who worked for Cunningham’s campaign to become the Dallas district attorney, reported that the judge “said he wanted to run for office so that he could save Dallas from ‘niggers,’ ‘wetbacks,’ Jews, and dirty Catholics.” In addition, she recounted a discussion about a Jewish attorney’s investigation into wrongful convictions during which Cunningham complained that the “‘filthy Jew’ . . . was going to come in and free all these ‘niggers.’”
Cunningham has also repeatedly espoused anti-Jewish stereotypes. In one instance detailed by Tackett, he warned that Jewish people need “to be shut down” because they control “all the money and all the power.” He reportedly wore a stereotypical banker’s outfit (a green visor and suspenders) at a casino-themed party and declared that he was a “Jew banker.” Even Cunningham’s mother admitted at one point that her son’s “biggest burden was his bigotry.”
The ACLU noted that despite his numerous derogatory comments to friends, family, and acquaintances, Cunningham managed to conceal the extent of his prejudice from the public for years—until a May 2018 article in the Dallas Morning News pulled back the curtain on him. No longer a judge, Cunningham was running for county commissioner when his brother revealed to the newspaper that he was a “lifelong racist.” The article also reported that Cunningham “described criminal cases involving black people as ‘T.N.D.s,’ short for ‘Typical Nigger Deals.’”
The Dallas Morning News article exposed the existence of a trust Cunningham had set up in 2010 for his children, with a stipulation that provides a monetary distribution upon marriage but only if the child marries a white, Christian person of the opposite sex.
Talk about covering all the bases.
