A group of civil rights organizations and legal ethicists filed a complaint of misconduct against a senior federal judge on Tuesday, alleging that recent remarks of hers showed bias against minority groups and an inappropriate religious belief in the death penalty.

The complaint, against Judge Edith H. Jones of Houston, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, asserts that at a speech at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in February she said that blacks and Hispanics were more prone than others to commit violent crimes and that a death sentence was a service to defendants because it allowed them to make peace with God.

The complaint is signed by representatives of, among others, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Texas Civil Rights Project and the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program and cites a number of people who attended the lecture.

A spokesman for the law school, Steven Barnes, said that the Federalist Society, the conservative group that hosted the speech, did not record it and that there appeared to be no transcript.