UNCORROBORATED EVIDENCE BRINGS SHAKY CONVICTIONS

The Texas Legislature has an opportunity to rectify a terrible injustice
and to prevent future scandals like the one in Tulia by passing legislation
requiring corroborating evidence for the testimony of undercover operatives
in drug enforcement cases.

By now, most every Texan who reads a newspaper knows about the Tulia drug
busts - 46 people were arrested on the uncorroborated word of an undercover
peace officer named Tom Coleman in a small town in the Texas Panhandle. A
judge recently recommended that the 38 convictions obtained through that
officer's testimony be thrown out because the officer couldn't be
considered a credible witness.

From Amarillo to Australia, from Lubbock to London, journalists have posed
the question: How could that happen in a modern criminal justice system?
Doesn't the state have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt?

Not in Texas. Here, the uncorroborated word of a police officer is enough
to convict anyone of drug charges that could lead to life imprisonment. One
Tulia defendant, for example, is serving sentences totaling more than 300
years. Now, it turns out, he may be innocent.

Most police officers never would set up an innocent person. But the handful
that break the rules cause untold harm. Coupled with large-scale racial
profiling in undercover drug stings (most of the Tulia defendants were
black), the failure to require corroboration has magnified individual
injustices into systemic failures to ensure civil rights and equal
protection under the law in Texas.

It is hard to understand how a prosecutor, much less a jury, could consider
the uncorroborated testimony of any one person to prove anything "beyond a
reasonable doubt," which is the standard the state supposedly must meet in
criminal cases. By definition, it seems, there is doubt if one man's word
is the only basis for prosecution. But hundreds, likely thousands, of
Texans have been incarcerated based on that kind of paltry, unsubstantiated
evidence.

Undercover drug enforcement is a special case where the public deserves
special protection. The federal General Accounting Office found in 1998
that "officers working in ... undercover operations could be more
vulnerable to involvement in illegal drug activities" and that "special
drug investigation units with low levels of supervision were ... considered
high-risk environments for drug-related corruption."

Texas law already requires corroboration for confidential informants in
undercover drug stings, and that requirement hasn't stemmed the tide of
informant-based drug convictions one bit. Applying that same requirement to
undercover police would ensure both fairness and uniformity of quality in
the prosecutions that do move forward.

Requiring corroboration for testimony is one of the oldest historical
tenets of justice. In the Bible, Moses, Jesus and the Apostle Paul all
believed that no person should be held to account on the testimony of a
single witness but only upon the concurrence of "two or three." Indeed,
that principle is a bulwark of Mosaic law.

Undercover drug cases may cost thousands of dollars to set up and
prosecute. So when those cases go sour, they represent large amounts of
wasted taxpayer dollars. Corroboration makes for better cases and fewer
taxpayer-funded mishaps.

And it would assure Texans that the state's leadership is committed to
tolerating no more Tulias. The Legislature should pass Senate Bill 515 and
House Bill 2625, which would require corroboration in undercover narcotics
operations and avoid the travesties of justice that now make Texas the
source of global ridicule.