TOWN ON TRIAL

Big Drug Bust Leads To Countercharges Of Racism

Announcer: DOWNTOWN begins, with TOWN ON TRIAL. And now, Jami Floyd.

JAMI FLOYD reporting:

Tulia, Texas is the kind of town where the dust rises under your feet with
every step, and they roll up the sidewalks just after dark. It's a place
that's quiet, and empty, and the folks who live here, black and white, all
know one another, most of them by name. It's not the sort of place you'd
expect to find a big drug problem, let alone a major drug ring. But
tonight, you're going to hear about one of the biggest drug busts ever in
this part of the world. So big, it changed the racial makeup of the
town. Tulia, it seemed, had won its war on drugs.

(VO) The police came at dawn.

Mr. JOE HENDERSON: I was still asleep.

Unidentified Woman #1: And I answered the door, and these two cops. I mean,
everybody had guns pulled.

Mr. BILLY WAFER: I opened the door and they said, 'Billy, we've got a
warrant for your arrest.' I said, 'For what?'

Ms. RAMONA STRICKLAND: (ph) They said for 'controlled substance.'

Mr. YUL BRYANT: And they said, 'Well you have--you have a delivery of a
controlled substance,' and I said 'To who?' And he said 'Well the man you
delivered the drugs to will be downtown.'

Woman #1: I was in my nightgown. They didn't let me put on pants.

Mr. Y. BRYANT: I didn't have on nothing, I didn't have no shoes, no socks,
no shirts, just my boxers, and I asked to put my clothes on. They say,
'Where you're going, you don't need no clothes.'

FLOYD: (VO) They were going to jail. Joe Henderson describes the humiliation.

Mr. HENDERSON: They said, if I don't get my black, you know what, in the
car, 'I'm going to put you in the car.' I said 'Don't do this in front of
my kids.' They were really shook up, they were just crying and first thing
out of the chief of police's mouth is that he said that, 'We can do what we
want to do.'

FLOYD: (VO) Tulia's tiny African-American community of just 250 was
devastated. Eventually, 46 people were arrested, all but five of them
black. Thirty percent of the adult black population indicted for selling
drugs, mostly powdered cocaine, to an undercover police officer. We spoke
with five of the Tulia defendants. Yul Bryant was one of the first to go
to jail.

Mr. Y. BRYANT: When I got there, there was another guy, Nacelle Vincent
(ph) and then Joe came and in Billy came in. That morning they took the
whole black community to jail.

FLOYD: (VO) The residents of Tulia, a predominantly white town, awoke that
morning to these images on local television. Images of their black
neighbors being hauled off to jail by the local sheriff, Larry Stewart.

Sheriff LARRY STEWART: I think this makes it very obvious we have a
problem. I can tell you that we didn't get everybody.

FLOYD: (VO) But no drugs, money or weapons were found in any of the houses,
and what's more, there were identifications that did not match the
suspects, and seemingly powerful alibis. Like forklift operator Billy
Wafer, the husband and father of two was indicted for allegedly selling
powdered cocaine at a local cattle auction, but he says he wasn't even there.

Mr. WAFER: I had time cards showing that I was at work.

FLOYD: (VO) And Wafer says he had witnesses to back him up.

Mr. JEFF BLACKBURN: Some of these cases are, obviously, completely phoney.
Yul Bryant's case, for example, dismissed by the state after he was in jail
for seven months.

FLOYD: (VO) American Civil Liberties Union attorney Jeff Blackburn
represents Bryant in a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit against Swisher
County. Bryant's police report describes him as "a tall black male with
bushy-type hair." But that police report is wrong.

(OC) How tall are you, Yul?

Mr. YUL BRYANT: 5'6"/5'7".

FLOYD: (VO) We also asked Bryant about his hair.

(OC) You didn't shave it since that identification?

Mr. Y. BRYANT: No. It was shaved before that identification. It's been
shaved like that for about six years.

FLOYD: (VO) So, who was filing all these police reports? This man, Tom
Coleman. An undercover agent hired by Sheriff Stewart to sniff out drugs in
Swisher County. Coleman who was the central figure in the Tulia drug sting
would later prove a controversial witness. More on Coleman later. Some
cases were dismissed, are still pending, or have resulted in probation. But
Agent Coleman testified against every defendant who went to trial. So far,
23 of the 46 Tulia defendants have been sent to
prison. Fifty-seven-year-old Joe Moore Sr., who had two prior felonies on
his record, was convicted of selling just an eighth of an ounce of powdered
cocaine. His sentence: 90 years. But even those with no prior drug
convictions got staggering sentences. Freddie Brookins, 20 years, and
Kizzie White no, prior drug convictions, 62 years.

Mr. BLACKBURN: In every one of these cases, what the state is doing is
saying to a jury, for example, 'Take our word for it. Take Coleman's word
for it, they should be sentenced to prison.' That's it.

FLOYD: (VO) One hundred thirty-two jurors in the Tulia cases voted to
convict based largely on Coleman's testimony, and the powdered cocaine he
produced in court. Cocaine, he said, came from the defendants. We spoke
with five of the jurors from two of the Tulia trials.

(OC) You don't think any of these 46 or so people are innocent?

Mr. DARYL TRUCKER (Juror): Nope.

Ms. SUE RIDDICK (Juror): It would be real nice if they were. It would be
real easy to get on the other side of it. No.

Ms. VENTURA RAMOS (Juror): These are the people we have to get rid of, then
let it be.

FLOYD: (VO) As the first defendants disappeared behind long prison
sentences, three we talked to said they felt their choice was clear, plead
guilty and take a deal, or go to trial and get the maximum.

Mr. HENDERSON: You know, I took one look at all those people in the
courtroom. You know, it was like 'Why come? There's nothing but white
people in here.'

FLOYD: (VO) At his trial, Joe Henderson got his first look at the case
file, and says he was startled by what he saw. The name on the file was
not his but that of his father, Cleveland Joe Henderson Sr., a convicted
felon in prison at the time. There was also this photo. Not of him, but of
his father.

Mr. HENDERSON: I'm--you know, I'm his son. I'm his blood son, but I'm
nothing like him.

FLOYD: (VO) Yet Henderson told us he was afraid to gamble with a jury, so
he pleaded guilty, in exchange for five years probation. Most of the white
residents we spoke with supported the sheriff's decision to execute the
raid, but the Tulia defendants found an unlikely ally in an unexpected
place, a local wheat and cattle farmer named Gary Gardner has taken up
their cause and taken on the white community.

Mr. GARY GARDNER: I initially picked up on the raid on television, channel
7, one morning. And they had images of black people being drug across the
courthouse lawn in their underwear, and their hair uncombed, like they
weren't humans.

FLOYD: (VO) Gardner is an outspoken critic of the local sheriff's war on drugs.

Mr. GARDNER: In this county, when someone says drug dealer, they're talking
about a person of black skin.

FLOYD: (VO) A plain-spoken man who uses the "n" word freely when the camera
isn't rolling, Gardner is at first blush an unlikely ally for the Tulia
defendants. But after the arrests, he says something just didn't sit right.

Mr. GARDNER: I knew that we didn't have 46 drug dealers in Tulia.

FLOYD: Why not?

Mr. GARDNER: We only got 5,000 people. Who you going to sell to? They
can't be that many.

FLOYD: (VO) So Gardner sat through several of the trials, and he started
digging.

Mr. GARDNER: I'm just an old dumb farmer. And all you got to do is set
down and go over the police reports, and it's there. Black and white. And
the evidence isn't there.

FLOYD: (VO) Take Ramona Strickland. She was indicted on one count of
selling powdered cocaine. In the police report, Coleman describes her as a
black female, 150 pounds. But as you can see, part of the report has been
scratched out.

Mr. GARDNER: I've used my little--my hand-held microscope that I check boll
weevil eggs with. After about 6 or 7 hours under the microscope, I
deciphered that scratched out part of that police report.

FLOYD: (VO) This is what Gardner saw.

Mr. GARDNER: "Approximately six months pregnant."

FLOYD: (VO) But Ramona Strickland says she wasn't pregnant.

Ms. STRICKLAND: I haven't been pregnant since I had my little girl. She's
six years old.

FLOYD: (VO) Nonetheless, she took a plea and paid a fine rather than risk a
jury trial. But there were questions about Coleman's undercover
methods. For one thing, Coleman didn't wear a wire, he later testified in
court and told the local press that he wrote any important information,
names, dates and descriptions of the alleged dealer on his leg.

Mr. BLACKBURN: This is a man, for criminey sake, who say's he's writing
down the notes about each case as he went on his leg. And that we should
rely on his reminiscences about what was once written on his leg to make
these cases. That's crazy.

FLOYD: (VO) Two months ago on the local news District Attorney Terry
McEachern defended Coleman's methods.

Mr. TERRY McEACHERN: We couldn't put surveillance in a town the size of
Tulia without being noticed, without raising some type of red flag.

FLOYD: (VO) But McEachern also told us that law enforcement had used
surveillance successfully in the past.

(OC) Would you have liked to have some corroboration, another witness, if
it had been possible or an audio tape or a video tape, something to back
him up a little bit? Would that have...

Mr. BUTCH BRYANT (Juror): No. I didn't need it. I didn't really need it.
I believe the man that much.

FLOYD: (VO) But what about Coleman himself? In a letter to the Tulia Herald
Coleman wrote he was only trying to protect descent citizens from drug
dealers. With the ACLU and NAACP lawsuit pending, Coleman, the sheriff and
the district attorney refused to speak with 20/20 on camera. They deny the
charges in the civil rights lawsuit and McEachern told our local affiliate
that they checked Coleman out before they hired him.

Mr. STEWART: We got Rangers standing up and verifying that he's a truthful
person.

FLOYD: (VO) But 20/20 DOWNTOWN has learned that a more thorough check would
have called into question Coleman's qualification for any role in law
enforcement.

Mr. BLACKBURN: They became aware that this was somebody that couldn't be
trusted.

FLOYD: (VO) While the Tulia sting was underway, Coleman was actually
charged in another county, with theft and abuse of official capacity. For
gas he purchased for personal use on police credit in 1996, before he was
hired by Sheriff Stewart. He had also borrowed almost $ 7,000 from local
vendors and then skipped town.

Mr. GARDNER: My opinion the minute the arrest warrant come down, they
should have closed that sting out. Shut it down, fired Mr. Coleman.
Because without the integrity of your undercover man, you don't have
nothing. You have nothing.

FLOYD: (VO) In just one case, the jury heard two sheriffs' deputies testify
about Coleman's past, testimony that supports this pointed 1996 letter in
which Coleman's former boss, wrote, 'Mr. Coleman should not be in law
enforcement.' But remarkably, the jurors still believed Coleman, and when
we asked jurors in another case who hadn't heard about Coleman's past, they
said it wouldn't have made any difference to them either.

(OC) Would you have wanted to know any more information that would reflect
on his credibility? His propensity to tell the truth?

Mr. B. BRYANT: We weren't trying him.

Ms. DEBRA EARL (Juror): And what somebody's done in the past doesn't mean
they're not credible at the time they're doing a different job.

FLOYD: (VO) Almost four months after he was charged, Coleman did pay off
his debts and the charges were dropped. But critics say there's something
even more troubling than Coleman's seemingly shady past. They accuse him of
changing his story from trial to trial.

Mr. GARDNER: If you had one trial, he was testifying to something and it
kind of contradicted something he'd said before, he'd say, well that's not
right. This is what I'm saying now.

Mr. BLACKBURN: You begin to see a real pattern of just fudging on the
truth, not telling the truth.

FLOYD: (VO) So we asked the jurors how important Coleman's truthfulness was
for them.

(OC) What if you knew that he lied under oath in other cases? Would that be
something relevant to you? As a juror?

Ms. EARL: Sure. Sure. I mean, no one should lie under oath, I don't
think. For any reason.

FLOYD: (VO) And that is perhaps what bothers Gary Gardner most. He says he
will continue to fight for and with the Tulia defendants.

Mr. GARDNER: I want everyone to have a fair trial. I want every one of
these people to get a trial, have it moved to a different county, at least
100 miles from here, 200 miles, with a bunch of jurors that don't know
anything that took place in the paper.

FLOYD: (VO) Even if that happens, most of the black residents of Tulia say
they'll never feel the same about their white neighbors again.

Woman #1: It just split the town down the middle.

Mr. HENDERSON: They're really showing their true colors now.

Mr. WAFER: And they know the undercover, was a--his credibility and they
still 'They was guilty. They was guilty.'

ELIZABETH VARGAS, host:

So far, 10 of those convicted have filed appeals, and in addition to the
ACLU and NAACP lawsuit, a complaint has been filed with the Justice Department.