GET A WHIFF OF FACTS IN TULIA CASE AND FIND MUCH THAT SMELLS FUNNY

There's been a bad odor coming from the small town of Tulia for almost four
years now - the smell of injustice.

Yesterday, a judge took an important step to help clear the air by
overturning 38 drug convictions that civil-rights groups and defense
attorneys argued were racially motivated.

In 1999, 46 people were busted on drug charges that were, at the very
least, fishy, given the source of the arrests - an undercover agent with a
suspect past and virtually no corroborating evidence. Thirteen of those
arrested in the sting operation were convicted and are still in prison.
Others served time or were sentenced to probation.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had ordered a hearing to review
evidence against four of the defendants, and that opened the door to
long-awaited, sorely needed new scrutiny.

Retired state District Judge Ron Chapman, who presided over the hearing,
recommended that the appeals court grant new trials to everyone convicted
in the busts.

Given what we've all learned about those arrests, the judge made the right
call.

The undercover agent, Tom Coleman, didn't use any surveillance equipment -
such as a hidden camera or tape recorder - during the 18-month sting. He
apparently scribbled a few notes about alleged drug buys on his legs, which
says about as much as we need to know about the sophistication of this
whole operation.

Almost since day one, civil-rights advocates expressed concern that the
drug busts were racially motivated. Thirty-nine of the 46 folks arrested
and hauled off to jail were black. That's about 85 percent.

It also was a significant chunk of the few hundred black residents who live
in Tulia, a town of about 5,000 between Lubbock and Amarillo.

Mr. Coleman's ex-wife, Carol Barnett, said in a sworn affidavit that Mr.
Coleman was a racist who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan - claims that Mr.
Coleman denied. However, Mr. Coleman acknowledged that he occasionally used
the n-word as a term of endearment for black friends.

How endearing.

"It's kind of like a greeting," Mr. Coleman said in a court hearing March
21. "It would be like when a friend would come over to the house, and I
would open the door, and I would say, 'What's up, nigger?' "

A racial epithet alone doesn't mean the drug busts were suspect.

Nor does an ex-wife's allegations about involvement in the KKK.

And maybe even Mr. Coleman's sporadic memory about details of the sting
operation is nothing to turn your nose up about.

But when you add them all together, a red flag sort of goes up.

The whole case would seem to hinge on whether anybody can believe Mr.
Coleman. Here's what Judge Chapman had to say: "It is stipulated by all
parties and approved by the court that Tom Coleman is simply not a credible
witness under oath."

Maybe that's why Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart twice requested the
sealing of a state agency file on Mr. Coleman - though the sheriff said he
did it to protect Mr. Coleman's identity.

How endearing.

I applaud communities that go to great lengths to root drugs out of towns
large and small, but there needs to be much more accountability than we saw
in Tulia. It's not like Tulia's alone. We've had our own problems here in
Dallas with an undercover police informant who was involved in a fake-drug
scandal that wrongly landed some Hispanic people in jail.

And in November of last year, 28 blacks were arrested in a drug sweep in
the small Central Texas town of Hearne. A confidential informant was behind
those arrests, too. Once prosecutors determined that the informant who gave
information to the narcotics task force was unreliable, many of the charges
were dropped.

I should point out that Gov. Rick Perry has since asked that drug task
forces be monitored by the state Department of Public Safety, lest we see
more embarrassing episodes such as those that occurred in Hearne and Tulia.

As the governor would tell you, this isn't about race. It's about justice.