Texas Sets Execution Date For Jewish Prisoner Who Alleges Judge Was Racist and Anti-Semitic

A Texas coun­ty court has set an exe­cu­tion date for a Jewish death-row pris­on­er despite his pend­ing fed­er­al appeal alleg­ing that the judge who presided over his tri­al and sen­tenc­ing should have been removed from the case because of his big­ot­ed racist and anti-Semitic views. On July 3, 2019, Dallas County Judge Lela Mays set an October 10 exe­cu­tion date for Randy Halprin, while he is active­ly lit­i­gat­ing a claim that for­mer Judge Vickers Cunningham repeat­ed­ly referred to Halprin and his co-defen­dants using racial and reli­gious slurs, in vio­la­tion of Halprin’s due process right to a fair tri­al and sen­tenc­ing before an impartial tribunal. 

Halprin is one of the ​“Texas 7,” a group of men who escaped from a max­i­mum-secu­ri­ty Texas prison on December 13, 2000. After escap­ing, the men robbed a sport­ing goods store, where they were con­front­ed by Officer Aubrey Hawkins. Five of the sev­en escapees fired shots, killing Officer Hawkins. Halprin main­tains that he did not fire any shots, and that he was reluc­tant about the plan to bring guns to the rob­bery in the first place. ​“You know, I, before the rob­bery, I even told them, I’m not going to go in and car­ry a gun, and there was a lit­tle argu­ment,” he told the jury dur­ing tri­al. ​“And so I told them I wasn’t going to pull a gun and they said, fine, just gath­er clothes, grab a shop­ping cart, and gath­er clothes.” He was con­vict­ed under Texas’ con­tro­ver­sial ​“law of par­ties,” which allows defen­dants to be sen­tenced to death based upon the actions and intent of oth­ers, if the defen­dant played even a small role in a crime that result­ed in someone’s death. 

Halprin’s lawyers filed his appeal in May after read­ing a 2018 Dallas Morning News report that for­mer Judge Vickers Cunningham had made racist, homo­pho­bic, and anti-Semitic remarks, and had even set up a trust that reward­ed his chil­dren if they mar­ried a white Christian of the oppo­site sex. The sto­ry trig­gered an inves­ti­ga­tion by Halprin’s defense team in which they learned that Cunningham had called Halprin a ​“f***ing Jew” and a ​“G*****n k**e.” Cunningham’s long­time acquain­tance Tammy McKinney pro­vid­ed Halprin’s attor­neys with a sworn dec­la­ra­tion that Cunningham ​“took spe­cial pride” in sen­tenc­ing Halprin and the oth­er mem­bers of the ​“Texas 7” because the group includ­ed Latinos and a Jewish per­son. She said he bragged about impos­ing death sen­tences on Halprin and his Latino co-defen­dants, report­ed­ly say­ing: ​“From the w**back to the Jew, they knew they were going to die.” During an unsuc­cess­ful 2006 cam­paign for Dallas District Attorney, Cunningham also said, ​“My job is to pre­vent n*****s from run­ning wild again.” 

Halprin’s appeal asserts that “[t]he U.S. Constitution for­bids the par­tic­i­pa­tion of a judge in a crim­i­nal tri­al who har­bors an actu­al bias or an objec­tive­ly intol­er­a­ble risk of bias at tri­al.” Quoting the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017 rul­ing in Buck v. Davis, Halprin’s lawyers wrote, ​“When a judge express­es reli­gious and racial bias and pre­sides over a cap­i­tal tri­al, it rep­re­sents ​‘a dis­turb­ing depar­ture from a basic premise of our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem: Our law pun­ish­es peo­ple for what they do, not who they are.’” In response to the death war­rant, Halprin’s attor­ney, Tivon Schardl, issued a state­ment say­ing, ​“Shocking new evi­dence leaves no doubt that Mr. Halprin’s legal pro­ceed­ings were uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and unre­li­able due to tri­al judge Vickers Cunningham’s anti-Semitic big­otry against Mr. Halprin. In case after case, the U.S. Supreme Court has clear­ly and con­sis­tent­ly enforced defen­dants’ con­sti­tu­tion­al right to a judge free of bias. … No exe­cu­tion can pro­ceed until the courts have time to con­sid­er the impor­tant new evi­dence that big­otry infect­ed Mr. Halprin’s legal process. Ultimately, the Constitution requires that Mr. Halprin must have a new tri­al and sen­tenc­ing hear­ing, free of dis­crim­i­na­tion and bias.” 

In a sup­port­ing brief, the Anti-Defamation League said, ​“It would be fair to ques­tion Judge Cunningham’s objec­tiv­i­ty about Jews if he made even one of the state­ments about them attrib­uted to him by the Exhibits. Taken as a whole, his repeat­ed ref­er­ences to ​“f****n’ Jews” and ​“k***s,” his use of the term ​“Jew” as a pejo­ra­tive, and his appar­ent belief in the anti-Semitic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Jews con­trol mon­ey and pow­er make it impos­si­ble to avoid the con­clu­sion that he is an anti-Semite.”