A few years ago, Max Soffar made a fuss when Texas...

A few years ago, Max Soffar made a fuss when Texas prison officials told him that he could not have a rabbi attend him before his execution. Not long afterward, he asked his lawyer to make sure he would be buried in the same Jewish cemetery as his adoptive parents rather than under a nameless cross in the prison cemetery in Huntsville like his fellow death-row inmates. After 20 years on the nation's most populous death row, a federal court panel has handed Soffar his 1st partial victory, ordering that he be either released or retried because of flaws in his 1981 murder conviction. A 3-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, ruled last December that his conviction relied "almost exclusively" on confessions illegally made to the police in the absence of a lawyer. A former drug addict and police informer, Soffar was charged with committing an execution-style murder in the course of an armed robbery at a bowling alley in northwest Houston on the night of July 13, 1980. 4 people were shot in the head at point-blank range. One survived.