A Jewish resident of the state of Texas who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death will likely receive a retrial after the prosecution and the defense joined hands and asked to overturn the sentence and hold a retrial.
The reason: the judge who was in charge of the legal proceedings against Halperin was revealed to hold distinct anti-Semitic views, and therefore allegedly violated Halperin's constitutional rights to a fair trial.
Halperin was sentenced to death in 2003 after being convicted of murdering a local police officer when he escaped from prison while serving a sentence for assaulting a minor.
As mentioned, he escaped from prison that year along with six other people and together they committed a series of crimes, culminating in the murder of police officer Aubrey Hawkins from the city of Irving.
Six of the seven were tried and four of them were executed, but Halperin, one of the two convicts who are still alive, is expected to receive a retrial.
This, after the district attorney filed a petition to overturn the conviction, in an unusual step.
The district attorney's office said that the conviction should be overturned after it became clear that during the hearing to determine the sentence, the judge, Vickers Cunningham, was heard saying harsh anti-Semitic things, according to the testimonies of those present at the scene.
In addition, the judge also spoke outside the walls of the court about the need to "save Dallas from the Jews and the blacks" when he ran for a senior position, using harsh abusive words.
The evidence against him accumulated more and more, and as mentioned this week the prosecution joined.
Among other things, the witnesses claimed that he called the convicts "the Mexican, the queer, and the Jew" and also referred to Halperin in court with a derogatory word against Jews or "that crazy Jew".
Halperin's defense team thanked the witnesses and praised the "courage of those present in court" and said that they "performed their civic duty and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the judge had anti-Semitic views towards Halperin."
The district attorney's petition to overturn the conviction states that the prosecution wants to overturn the move, even though it filed the indictment as stated, because the judge's positions "created a serious bias against him during the trial."
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