STATE INQUIRY MAY NOT HELP THOSE JAILED IN TULIA STING

HARLINGEN, Texas - A state review of a controversial drug bust in Tulia,
Texas, will move as quickly as possible but may have limited ability to
help those imprisoned in the sting, a legislative panel was told Friday.
Three prosecutors and two investigators from the attorney general's office
are investigating the 1999 West Texas drug cases, and they began meeting
Thursday with local authorities, First Assistant Attorney General Howard
Baldwin told members of the House Judicial Affairs Committee.

But committee Chairwoman Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, said the attorney
general's efforts may do little to help those convicted because their cases
are under the jurisdiction of the appellate courts.

Without the discovery of significant evidence never made available to their
attorneys, she added, it will be difficult to persuade courts to grant new
trials.

"It's not going to make a lot of difference what anyone goes out and
investigates at all," she said. "If the courts don't do anything to turn it
around, then we're just whistling in the wind.

"All of the information you gather is not going to get anybody out of jail."

Attorney General John Cornyn announced the investigation last month after
his office was criticized by the House panel for ignoring the racially
charged case.

Forty-three Tulia residents were arrested in July 1999 after an 18-month
investigation by a lone undercover drug agent. The case caused immediate
uproar because 37 of the defendants were black - about 10 percent of the
black population in the town of 5,100.

The case was also questioned because the investigator, then employed by an
Amarillo-based regional drug task force, had little or no evidence to back
his allegations.

Most of the defendants pleaded guilty and accepted prison terms as high as
18 to 20 years to avoid stiffer sentences by juries that heard initial drug
bust cases. The first defendants who opted to go to trial got prison terms
of 90 to 320 years.

Arrests defended

Tom Coleman, the investigator, and the Swisher County sheriff who asked
that the investigator be brought into Tulia, have maintained that the cases
were properly handled. Each has dismissed complaints about racism. Mr.
Coleman, who was named drug investigator of the year by a state drug task
force coordinating office for his efforts in Tulia, has since left law
enforcement. He could not be reached Friday.

Mr. Baldwin told the panel that the attorney general's office did not begin
an investigation sooner because of its lack of jurisdiction. The attorney
general's office does not have the authority to prosecute cases without
consent from local prosecutors, so it historically has not launched
investigations unless asked by local authorities, he said.

After committee members closely questioned a member of his staff at an
August hearing, Mr. Baldwin said, Mr. Cornyn contacted officials with the
Department of Justice about a federal civil rights investigation in the
Tulia case.

"After talking to the Department of Justice, the attorney general was
concerned that that investigation was bogged down, wasn't moving very fast.
I think that's obvious," Mr. Baldwin said. "He made the decision ... that
we would go ahead and start an investigation."

Mr. Baldwin said Mr. Cornyn again contacted the Justice Department this
week and asked that his investigators be given full access to FBI files and
other documents in the federal civil rights investigation.

Terry McEachern, district attorney for Swisher and Hale counties, has
agreed to give state investigators access to a local grand jury to hear any
evidence of wrongdoing.

Jeff Blackburn, an Amarillo lawyer leading a team of eight attorneys
challenging the cases, said he welcomed the attorney general's interest but
added that "there's really not that much to investigate."

Mr. Blackburn said that Mr. Coleman has been proved a liar in several of
the cases, including one in which a woman was cleared this year after it
was proved that she was in Oklahoma City on the day Mr. Coleman said she
sold him drugs.

'Wrecked a lot of lives'

"We knew she hadn't lived there. and they knew she hadn't lived there,"
said the woman's mother, Mattie Russell, who has three other children who
were convicted in the sting. "Tom Coleman just came in and wrecked a lot of
lives." Mr. Blackburn said he and other defense lawyers have evidence
showing at least two other instances in which Mr. Coleman gave false
testimony. He added that there is evidence of witness tampering.

In one case he defended, Mr. Blackburn said, he learned that Mr. Coleman
hired a lawyer to send letters threatening former acquaintances with libel
lawsuits if they spoke to defense lawyers or investigators about his
troubled past.

He said he and other lawyers involved in trying to help the Tulia
defendants will begin filing new legal challenges within the next month.
"We can prove that due process was completely short-circuited in these
cases, every single one of them," he said. "That's what we think the
attorney general needs to be addressing. Not some elusive issue of whether
these people were racist or not."