For the second time in eight years, Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals has reversed the death sentence of a man who was convicted for the brutal killing of pioneering Dallas civil rights attorney Fred Finch, because a jury was not properly instructed about the defendant’s intellectual disability.

Kenneth Wayne Thomas was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1987 for the slayings of both Fred Finch, one of the first African-American graduates of Harvard Law School, and his wife, Mildred Finch, a college math instructor, in their modest home in South Dallas.