DON'T FORGET VICTIMS OF FALSE PROSECUTIONS

When something goes wrong in the criminal justice system, it's never too
late to try to make it right.

Exhibit A: 45 people in the Texas Panhandle town of Tulia who now have
their hands on some rather sizable settlement checks.

The story dates back to a 1999 drug sting, in which, originally, 46 people
were charged with dealing drugs. They were pardoned and released from jail
after serious questions were raised about the conduct of police and
prosecutors. One of the defendants has since died. The other 45 sued,
claiming the arrests were racially motivated.

Could be. Thirty-nine of the original 46 defendants were black, and the
former undercover officer who made the arrests - Tom Coleman - has
acknowledged using the "n-word" in polite conversation.

Meanwhile, Swisher County District Attorney Terry McEachern has
acknowledged in a deposition that he knew that Mr. Coleman had been
untruthful in other cases. And yet he put the rogue lawman on the stand and
built dozens of new cases on Mr. Coleman's testimony.

Now, it's Mr. McEachern who finds himself sitting at the defendant's table.
Already sanctioned by the State Bar of Texas for violating the legal
requirement to turn over to the defense exculpatory evidence that might
have undercut Mr. Coleman's credibility, Mr. McEachern is now headed for
the additional humiliation of a public hearing in which he plans to
challenge the bar's ruling.

That's what I call a happy ending. We could use one of those in Dallas
County, where three years later, authorities are still dodging
responsibility for the fake-drug scandal.

It is still unclear whether police and prosecutors suspected something was
amiss in these cases, and failed to do anything about it. It also wouldn't
hurt to know if prosecutors pushed through cases before they were solid
enough to take to court, as has been suggested to me by narcotics officers.
We already know that - in other cases - a prosecutor was about to arrange a
plea agreement without looking at lab reports indicating that the drugs
were fake, and that another prosecutor failed to disclose to the defense
that a sheriff's deputy had lied on the witness stand. If anything similar
happened in the cases that grew into fake-drug scandal, the public should
know and the culprits should be fired.

It was supposedly to get to the bottom of all this that a "special
prosecutor" was appointed late last year by District Attorney Bill Hill,
whose office - let's remember - owns at least 50 percent of the scandal.
Mr. Hill made a brilliantly cynical choice in tapping Dan Hagood, a Dallas
lawyer who, in his private practice, represents criminal defendants who are
being prosecuted by the same office that Mr. Hagood is now supposed to
investigate.

In such transactions, prosecutors have the power - to dismiss cases, reduce
charges or recommend lenient sentences. And so, if you're a defense
attorney, antagonizing prosecutors can be bad for business. And yet Mr.
Hagood is supposed to be independent.

If you believe that, you're more gullible that those cops who couldn't tell
one kind of white powder from another. It's no wonder some in the Dallas
legal community are voicing doubts that Mr. Hagood will indeed - as he
promised when he was appointed - "follow the roads wherever they lead." So
far, Mr. Hagood has indicted three police officers and five informants but
no prosecutors.

To be fair, the special prosecutor is looking for criminal violations, but
wouldn't that include instances of prosecutors signing plea agreements that
they knew or had reason to suspect were based on false evidence? We don't
know if that happened, but we never will if Mr. Hagood doesn't investigate
the possibility. So far, there hasn't even been a whisper from Mr. Hagood's
office that prosecutors did anything wrong.

It's possible that the special prosecutor is merely playing his cards very
close to his vest. Still, given that several of the people indicted were
already brought up on charges in federal court for the same scandal, it
seems the roads that Mr. Hagood has been following are leading him in
circles. After the settlement was accepted in Tulia, a lawyer for the NAACP
declared that horrible chapter closed. Not so in Dallas, where, in a story
line all its own, a rewriting of history may be quietly under way.

Ruben Navarrette is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. His
e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com.