DRIVING THROUGH TENAHA, TEXAS, DOESN'T PAY FOR SOME TEXAS, BLACK MOTORISTS

The Tenaha, Texas welcome sign on March 3. The tiny east Texas town is
making money by pulling over black motorists and seizing their cash
and property without charging them with any crime. A lawsuit alleges
that the town's police pull over motorists -- especially African
Americans -- and extort money and valuables by threatening criminal
charges or worse.

You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana state
line if you're African American, but you might not be able to drive out of
it -- at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other
valuables.

That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip
motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging
them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice:
Sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money
laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to
June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black
grandmother from Akron, Ohio, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after
Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston,
who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their
children and put them into foster care, the court documents show.
Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with or convicted
of any crime.

Officials in Tenaha, along a heavily traveled state highway connecting
Houston with several popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say
they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking, and they call
the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's
asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep
drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and
add the proceeds to their budgets.

"We try to enforce the law here," said George Bowers, mayor of the
town of about 1,100 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber
open ones and City Hall sports a broken window. "We're not doing this
to raise money. That's all I'm going to say at this point."

But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha's practice something else:
highway robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action
lawsuit seeking unspecified damages and a halt to what they contend is
an unconstitutional perversion of the law's intent, used primarily
against African Americans who have done nothing wrong.

Tenaha officials "have developed an illegal 'stop and seize' practice
of targeting, stopping, detaining, searching, and often seizing
property from apparently nonwhite citizens and those traveling with
nonwhite citizens," asserts the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S.
District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.

The property seizures are not happening just in Tenaha. In southern
parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Latinos allege
that they are being singled out.

According to a prominent Texas state legislator, police agencies
across the state are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more
aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.

"If used properly, it's a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime
doesn't pay," said Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of
the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where
people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no
charges filed and no convictions, I think that's theft."

Money, minorities

David Guillory, an attorney in nearby Nacogdoches who filed the
federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records
from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha
police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the
cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police
seized cash, jewelry, cellphones and sometimes even automobiles from
motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any
crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the
motorists directly -- and discovered that all but one of them were
black.

"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities,
particularly African Americans," Guillory said. "Every one of these
people is pulled over and told they did something, like, 'You drove
too close to the white line.' That's not in the penal code, but it
sounds plausible. None of these people have been charged with a crime;
none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is
that they had something that looked valuable."

In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large
amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in
laundering drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers
he contacted could account for where the money had come from and why
they were carrying it -- such as for a gambling trip to Shreveport,
La., or to purchase a used car from a private seller.

Once the motorists were detained, the police and the Shelby County
district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an
option: Waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony
charges for crimes such as money laundering -- and the prospect of
having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to
contest the charges in court.

Apparently routine

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory
discovered pre-signed and pre-notarized police affidavits with blank
spaces left for an officer to fill in a description of the property
being seized.

Jennifer Boatright, her husband and two young children -- a mixed-race
family -- were traveling from Houston to visit relatives in East Texas
in April 2007 when Tenaha police pulled them over, alleging that they
were driving in a left-turn lane.

After searching the car, the officers discovered what Boatright said
was a gift for her sister: a small, unused glass pipe made for smoking
marijuana. Although they found no drugs or other contraband, the
police seized $6,037 that Boatright said the family was carrying to
purchase a used car -- and then threatened to turn their children,
ages 10 and 1, over to Child Protective Services if the couple didn't
agree to sign over their right to their cash.

"It was give them the money or they were taking our kids," Boatright
said. "They suggested that we never bring it up again. We figured we
better give them our cash and get the hell out of there."

Several months later, after Boatright and her husband contacted an
attorney, Tenaha officials returned their money but offered no
explanation or apology. The couple remain plaintiffs in the federal
lawsuit.

Except for Tenaha's mayor, none of the defendants in the federal
lawsuit, including Shelby County Dist. Atty. Lynda Russell and two
Tenaha police officers, responded to requests for comment about their
search-and-seizure practices. Lawyers for the defendants also declined
to comment, as did several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

But Whitmire says he doesn't need to await the suit's outcome to try
to fix what he regards as a statewide problem. On Monday, he
introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would require police
to go before a judge before attempting to seize property under the
asset-forfeiture law -- and ultimately Whitmire hopes to tighten the
law further so that law-enforcement officials will be allowed to seize
property only after a suspect is charged and convicted in a court.

"The law has gotten away from what was intended, which was to take the
profits of a bad guy's crime spree and use it for additional crime
fighting," Whitmire said. "Now it's largely being used to pay police
salaries -- and it's being abused because you don't even have to be a
bad guy to lose your property."