By admin 
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has granted a new trial to one of the last living members of the Texas 7.
Randy Halprin was part of a group of escapees who broke out of the Connally Unit, a Texas prison, in 2000 and fatally shot police officer Aubrey Hawkins while on the run.
Halprin was sentenced to death under Texas’ “law of parties,” which allows defendants to be convicted and punished based on the intentions of others in a group.
The appeals court had halted Halprin’s execution in 2019 — six days before he was set to die — when Halprin’s lawyers argued he should get a new trial because the judge presiding over his case referred to the inmate — who is Jewish — as racist statements. slander and anti-Semitic language.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center
in December 2022, Dallas County Judge Lela Lawrence May recommended a new trial for Halprin, finding that former Dallas County Judge Vickers Cunningham “harbored actual, subjective biases” against Halprin at the time of his trial because he is Jewish.
Halprin’s attorneys submitted evidence spanning decades of Cunningham’s repeated use of homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist slurs.
Judge Mays found the testimony credible and said Cunningham exhibited a longstanding pattern of anti-Semitism.
On Wednesday, the court ruled that a new trial was based on what Judge Mays concluded was a “violation of due process, equal protection of the law, and free exercise of religion.”
Halprin had testified during the trial that he did not have a gun and did not fire any shots during the robbery that killed the officer.
“I told them I wasn’t going to pull a gun, and they said, ‘Okay, just collect clothes, get a shopping cart and collect clothes,’” Halprin said.
Of the seven escaped prisoners, only two are still alive: Halprin and Patrick Murphy, who did not participate in the robbery and waited outside in a car. Murphy awaits execution.
Halprin is expected to be sent to Dallas for his retrial.