CRACKPOT CRACKDOWN

Jackson County's DA Has Convicted 28 Black People on Drug Charges Via
Manufactured Evidence and Railroaded Trials. Now a Small-Town Exile,
Her Family, and a Few Neighbors Are Fighting Back

Frederick "Rick" Patterson was born in the small Southeast Texas city
of Edna, seat of Jackson Co. and just north of Port Lavaca, in 1954,
the same year the rural community earned its first moment in the
national spotlight. That January, the U.S. Supreme Court heard an
appeal brought by convicted murderer Pete Hernandez, an agricultural
worker in Edna, who argued that Jackson Co. prosecutors denied his
right to equal protection under the law by excluding
Mexican-Americans from the jury pool. Hernandez's attorneys had
discovered that from 1929 to 1954, not a single Mexican-American had
ever served on a Jackson Co. jury - nor, for that matter, had any
black juror. The state Court of Criminal Appeals had rejected
Hernandez's argument - ruling that Hispanics were a subset of whites
and therefore could not be considered a "special class" under the
14th Amendment. But on May 3, 1954, in a precedent-setting opinion
authored by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a unanimous Supreme Court
disagreed. Hernandez had "the right to be indicted and tried by
juries from which all members of his class [were] not systematically
excluded," Warren wrote. Indeed, Warren noted that courthouse
practice itself belied Jackson Co. officials' assertion that Mexicans
were considered equal to whites, for the courthouse had two separate
men's restrooms - one for whites, and the other labeled for "Colored
Men" and "Hombres Aqui."

Fifty-one years later, it seems, too little has changed in Edna.

The segregated restrooms are gone. But the town remains an East Texas
- - or Old South - throwback, where racism simmers like a bully's
threat, and equal justice under the law appears little more than an
outsider's sentimental fancy. And in the fall of 2002, Edna's
institutionalized rural racism overmatched Justice's balanced scales
when 29 African-American residents - nearly 4% of the town's black
population - including Patterson, a lifelong Ednan, and later, his
wife, Joycelyn - were rounded up and charged with felony drug
offenses in connection with a six-month undercover drug sting, a
joint operation of the Edna Police Department and the Jackson Co.
Sheriff's Office coyly dubbed "Operation Crackdown."

"Eight of the defendants were located at one time in a bar in Edna.
Four more were gathered up that same night," breathlessly reported
the Edna Herald on Nov. 20. "The bottom line is that this type of
conduct will not be tolerated here in Jackson County," sheriff Kelly
R. Janica told the paper at the time. "We are going to do our job to
keep drugs from infecting our streets." (And as this story was in
preparation, it appears the job was far from completed - see
"'Crackdown' Becomes 'Shutdown,'" below.)

But, in what has become an all-too-typical tale of rogue criminal
justice in rural Texas - epitomized by the infamous 1999 Tulia drug
sting - it appears that the Edna "crackdown" had much less to do with
eradicating drugs than it did with institutionalized, small-town
racism. Under the guise of removing drugs (specifically, crack
cocaine) from the streets, local lawmen may have themselves broken
state law, primarily by relying on a local crack addict as their sole
informant to send 28 of the 29 defendants to prison for sentences
from one to 20 years. Only two of the defendants, including
Patterson, dared to challenge the charges in court; the rest accepted
plea bargains offered by longtime Jackson Co. District Attorney Bobby
Bell. They did so, it seems certain, in large part out of fear of
challenging Bell's authority and thus receiving even heavier
sentences. (Charges were dismissed in one case.)

One white Edna resident who requested anonymity, fearing retaliation,
said bluntly that Bell's attitude is "'I'll break you, I'll take
everything you've got; so take the plea [or] I'll make sure you go to
jail.' He does as he pleases."

Indeed, going to trial didn't help Rick Patterson at all. Instead, on
virtually no evidence, and that circumstantial, a jury of nine whites
and three Hispanics (11 jurors were women) quickly convicted
Patterson, and Judge Skipper Koetter imposed the max: 10 years for
each of the three charges. (In a moment of magnanimity, Koetter ruled
that Patterson's sentences should run concurrently.)

Crackdown was not the first operation of its kind in Edna. By the
estimate of many African-American residents, at least half the
county's black population is "on paper" in some way with Texas'
criminal justice system, either in prison or out on parole or
probation - meaning, among other things, that many local blacks are
unable to vote. But Operation Crackdown may wind up being the sting
that broke the back of the already disenfranchised and beleaguered
black community - and the sting that finally pushes them to fight
back. "I am 27 [years old] and for 10 years I've seen my people go in
and out and in and out of jail," said La'Trinda Patterson, Rick and
Joycelyn's eldest daughter. "This is how it is and this is how it is
always going to be [if] everyone is intimidated by Bobby Bell. It
[has] hit home, and I know my parents didn't do it."

Indeed, if La'Trinda Patterson and her parents, along with an
increasing number of Edna's residents and a small group of mostly
volunteer attorneys - among them Amarillo lawyer Jeff Blackburn (who
was instrumental in overturning the unjust Tulia convictions) - have
their way, Jackson County's brand of justice will finally be exposed,
and Edna will earn a second moment in the national spotlight.

Playing Ball With Bell

On Nov. 11, 2002, Rick Patterson was on his way home from his job as
a supervisor at the Inteplast plastics plant in Lolita, in southern
Jackson Co., when he was stopped by police in front of the
Rent-A-Center in Edna and arrested on three counts of delivery of
less than a gram of crack cocaine. Word of Patterson's arrest spread
quickly through Edna's northeast side, home to the vast majority of
the town's 796 black people. It wasn't long before someone called
La'Trinda Patterson at her home in Houston with the news. La'Trinda
was shocked. "I was like, how in the hell did he get caught up in
this shit?" she recalled recently. "For 50 years he did nothing but
work and raise kids. Why, how, and why now?"

Indeed, the idea that Rick Patterson had anything to do with drugs is
difficult to believe. Patterson was born and raised in Edna, as was
Joycelyn, his wife of 33 years. The couple lived in the house
Joycelyn grew up in, where they raised three daughters, looked after
their aging parents who lived nearby, worked hard, and Rick coached
youth sports. The Pattersons were one of the town's most respected
black families - their door was always open, Joycelyn always had
something cooking in the kitchen, and Rick often left his keys in his
car in case somebody needed a ride.

Moreover, Joycelyn and Rick know the scourge of crack - their home is
two doors down from a notorious and now-vacant crack house, and
several of Joycelyn's relatives have long struggled with addiction.
The Pattersons strove to ensure that their kids would grow up in an
environment that strongly discouraged drug use. "My mom broke it
down," La'Trinda said. "She said, you have two choices in life. One,
to be a smoker and lose everything," or two, to get an education, get
out of Edna, and live life. No one, including white friends of the
Pattersons, could believe Rick was a drug dealer. The Pattersons "are
a hard-working, taxpaying family that took care of their business and
raised their children," said one native Ednan. "I believe they were
ramrodded. I can't prove it, but I believe it."

The day after Rick was arrested, La'Trinda drove to Edna from Houston
to help bail him out of jail and find an attorney. The family raised
enough to post bond, but finding an attorney was another matter.
La'Trinda called a host of area lawyers, but when she told them it
was a Jackson Co. drug case and that her dad intended to fight the
charges on the grounds that he was, in fact, innocent, the attorneys
she called turned tail. "As soon as I said it was Jackson County,
they said, 'Oh no, Bobby Bell.' And they wouldn't take the case."

The attorneys' reluctance didn't exactly surprise the Pattersons, who
know that Jackson Co.'s long-time DA Bobby Bell has a reputation for
being a hardass. "Lawyers come up from Houston or the Valley and
they're shocked by the kind of justice they receive [in Edna]," said
one area lawyer. "If you're charged with a felony narcotics offense
there's not any way you're ever going to be given [probation]. Whites
can get breaks, but blacks and browns don't get breaks; they get nailed."

Of the 29 defendants charged in Operation Crackdown, 27 were
represented by court-appointed lawyers, and only two, Patterson and a
man named Tvan Bryant, declined Bell's plea offer, choosing to go to
trial. After finally securing Victoria lawyer Tali Villafranca to
represent her dad, La'Trinda said her family was cautiously
optimistic - after all, she said, her father is innocent. "[My dad]
didn't worry because Tali said that since he was innocent he could
beat [the charge]," she recalled. Rick had never been in trouble with
the law before; he'd never even received a speeding ticket, La'Trinda said.

Their confidence was soon shaken by a phone call from Villafranca.
"Tali ... called Bobby Bell to tell him that my dad wasn't going to
take a plea bargain and that he was going to trial," La'Trinda
recalled, "and then Tali called [my dad] and said that Bobby Bell
said to tell him, 'I have a surprise for [Rick], since he wants to
play ball with me.' ... The next thing we know ... my mom was
indicted and arrested." Indeed, in early 2003, Bell again shocked
many in the community by returning an indictment against Joycelyn,
charging her with one count of selling less than a gram of crack to
the same police informant to whom the other defendants were alleged
to have sold drugs. "It was totally weird," La'Trinda says, recalling
the day her mother was arrested. "My mama wouldn't even go near drugs."

The writing was on the wall: The wheels of Jackson County's criminal
justice system - as operated by DA Bobby Bell - had begun to spin,
and they weren't likely to stop until the Pattersons were behind
bars. "That's when we started putting everything together," La'Trinda said.

Radio Castaneda

Nearly three years later, the procedural facts of Operation Crackdown
remain fairly mysterious, largely because the undercover drug buys
that led to the 29 arrests were made exclusively by a local crack
addict, 26-year-old Santos Castro Castaneda. According to Castaneda's
testimony at Rick Patterson's Aug. 2004 trial, the entire operation
was basically her own idea. Castaneda, who had also grown up in Edna,
had been addicted to crack since she was 16; she'd tried rehab but it
hadn't worked. So, she said, she decided to try something different:
If she helped "clean up" the streets of Edna, she wouldn't be able to
buy any crack, and thus would have to quit using. "The reason why I
decided to help [the police was] so then I wouldn't be able to buy
drugs in Jackson County any more," she told the court.

According to Castaneda's testimony - and those of Edna Police
Investigator Craig Repka and Jackson Co. Lt. Curt Gabrysch, who
together formed the law-enforcement end of Operation Crackdown - the
mechanics of the undercover stings were simple. On 22 different dates
between May and November 2002, Castaneda drove to the municipal
airport, just outside the Edna city limits, to meet up with Repka and
Gabrysch. After performing a quick search of Castaneda and her car -
theoretically to ensure that Castaneda wasn't carrying any drugs of
her own - the officers provided her with buy money, typically $50 (in
bills that, for evidentiary purposes, they'd photocopied back at the
police station), placed an audio transmitter in her purse and sent
her on her way. Castaneda was told to talk as she drove, identifying
the streets she took and the people she encountered, so that - by
secondhand description - the officers could track her.

Without Castaneda's audio, the officers would have had no idea where
she was, because they didn't outfit her car with any video equipment.
Nor did they stay within visible range of her as she trolled for
dope. They had no choice but to remain invisible, the officers
testified, because if they got close enough to see the action, the
people they were angling to bust would most certainly spot them.
Additionally, Castaneda said that she was discouraged from buying
crack from the same person twice, since the goal was to try and get
as many different "drug dealers" as possible. Once she'd spotted a
dealer, identified the person on tape, and exchanged money for drugs,
Castaneda was instructed to place the crack rocks in "a cup holder
that's in the central console" of her car, Gabrysch testified, and
then to drive back to the airport, where the officers seized the
drugs. Over six months, the officers spent $1,340 on crack - funds
variously taken from either the city or county police budget - and
$2,985 on "rewards" for Castaneda, who got between $50 and $100 for each buy.

As was the case with each of the defendants, neither of the cops
responsible for Operation Crackdown ever saw Rick Patterson sell
drugs to Castaneda, or to anyone else. "To ... my knowledge no peace
officer actually saw visually" any of the alleged drug deals,
Gabrysch testified. Unbelievably, neither did Castaneda: "I was right
there at the area but I did not never ever see Rick Patterson hand
drugs to nobody," she testified. "And you are not claiming that Mr.
Patterson ever gave you any drugs, are you?" Patterson's attorney
Tali Villafranca asked.

"He never had," Castaneda replied.

"[H]e never gave them to you directly or indirectly, did he?"
Villafranca asked.

"No, sir. He didn't. No, sir. He didn't," she said. "I'm very
absolutely sure," she replied.

Still, Patterson was tried for three counts of selling less than a
gram of crack inside a so-called Drug-Free Zone (i.e., near a school)
- - which offered the state the ability to enhance his potential
sentences from state jail felony counts (punishable by up to two
years each), to third-degree felony counts, each punishable by up to
10 years in prison. Yet amazingly, the state had absolutely no direct
evidence that Patterson had ever committed any crime. "My client was
convicted on hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay," Villafranca said
recently. "It was ridiculous; it was so frustrating."

What the state did have were the audio recordings Castaneda made as
she cruised alone through Edna's eastside neighborhood. Exactly what
those tapes reveal is a matter of considerable debate, and
transcripts of the recordings reveal that Castaneda wasn't even
particularly diligent in identifying her routes - on more than one
occasion she says she doesn't know exactly what street she's on, or
identifies the area by using the nickname of a person who lives
nearby. All too often, the transcripts lack whole lines of
conversation, noting only that the dialogue between Castaneda and
whomever she is speaking to is simply "inaudible."

Big Rick and the Bitch

On only one point concerning Castaneda's wanderings do Patterson, his
defenders, and Bobby Bell apparently agree. According to the
recordings, on three different occasions Castaneda drove into Edna's
black neighborhood and approached three different people - Acie
Jones, Lisa Robinson, and Jesse Darnell Chase, all of whom are now in
prison - looking for drugs. From there, according to Bell, the
recordings reflect that each of the three people Castaneda approached
directed her to Rick Patterson's house to score a "tight fifty" - 50
dollars' worth of crack. "Three drug deals, three addicts, all direct
[her to] Rick Patterson's house," Bell said.

In fact, Bell insists, you can even hear Patterson on the tape: "A
person buying crack [Castaneda] says, 'Hi, Big Rick,'" he said. "We
don't have many 'Big Ricks' in Jackson County." (Many black residents
dispute Bell's contention: There are at least three men in the
neighborhood named "Rick" or "Ricky," and in old-school Edna everyone
has a nickname - if you're at all a large person, one of them is
bound to be "Big.")

To Villafranca, Bell's account is nonsense. For starters, Villafranca
said, the voice on the tape that Bell alleges is Patterson doesn't
even sound like him. "It really didn't," he said. "They kept saying,
'That sounds like a black man.' That's prejudicial; what does that
even mean? That's what I tried to tell the jurors, [that] there is
just no way to prove that's one voice or another." But the fact that
Castaneda never actually purchased drugs from Patterson directly, or
that neither Castaneda nor the police ever saw Patterson with crack,
or saw him hand it to anyone, is of little consequence to Bell -
indeed, for the DA, the omission appears to be only additional
evidence of Patterson's guilt. "Rick Patterson is one of the biggest
drug dealers we've had here," he asserts - conjuring up a version of
the middle-aged plant manager as in fact a smart, sneaky, and
paranoid dealer. "If I'm a major drug dealer and I'm smart, I
recognize that I'm a [visible] guy [in Edna]," Bell speculated. "So I
get little crackheads [whom I sell drugs through], and I'm never
going to leave the house. I sell drugs through [addicts]."

Bell insists that his version of events is supported by the trial
testimony of each of the three alleged go-betweens - Jones, Robinson,
and Chase, who testified that they got crack from Patterson or from
Patterson's house - that they then passed on to Castaneda. But their
testimony was also problematic, and not at all reliable, says
Villafranca. Jones, for example, was completely unable to describe
the inside of Patterson's house in any meaningful detail. Moreover,
each of the three had already been charged with dealing crack to
Castaneda, and Robinson and Chase agreed to testify against Patterson
only as a condition of their plea bargains. Indeed, in a prison
interview this spring, Rick Patterson said that Robinson had
confessed to a relative that she'd only agreed to testify after Bell
threatened to stick her with "the bitch" - life behind bars - if she
didn't cooperate. "Lisa [Robinson] and all three of her children got
time," as a result of the Castaneda crackdown, Patterson said.
"Everyone is just afraid of Bobby Bell." Regardless, whether it was
fear or evidence or something else in between that sealed the deal,
Patterson's 11-woman, one-man jury stood with Bell on Aug. 20, 2004,
and convicted Patterson on all three charges. He was sentenced to 10
years in prison.

Flat Time

The outcome of the trial devastated Rick's wife, Joycelyn. "I was so
scared after Rick went to trial and got the 10 years," she recalled
during an emotional interview. "He really didn't do anything. I think
it was all a setup." Since she'd been indicted the previous year -
five months after Rick told Bell that he would not plead guilty -
Joycelyn said that Villafranca, whom the family had also hired to
defend Joycelyn, had assured her that she and Rick would beat the
rap. "I made the decision that I'd stand by [Rick] because they
didn't have anything against me," she said. But according to Bell,
Joycelyn had covered the family's crack trade one night in August
2002, while Rick was out playing dominoes, by selling a rock to an
addict (Tanya Williams, Joycelyn's goddaughter) who was allegedly
buying for Castaneda. (Interestingly, Bell dismissed charges against
Williams, writing in court filings that Williams' testimony was
integral in putting a "substantial drug dealer" - presumably Joycelyn
- - out of business.)

Whether there's any audio or other evidence to back Bell's
allegations remains a mystery, since Joycelyn's case never made it to
trial. Rick's conviction, based solely on the testimony of Castaneda
- - the same addict whom Joycelyn allegedly had sold to - frightened
her enough that in October 2004, Joycelyn agreed to plead guilty to
one count of selling Castaneda less than a gram of crack. Like Rick,
she'd never been in trouble before and had little understanding of
how the criminal justice system worked; in deciding to plea, she'd
placed her faith in Villafranca. "I've never dealt with ... the
system before. I've never even had a speeding ticket," she said.
"Tali had said all along [that] this was a first-time offense and
[that all] I'd likely get would be probation."

That didn't happen.

On Nov. 8, 2004, Joycelyn was sentenced to two years "flat time" -
since the alleged crack deal took place inside a DFZ, she would not
be eligible for early release; the Patterson home, along with much of
Edna's historically black neighborhood, is within 1,000 feet of
Edna's Carver Elementary School, or else near the small patch of
scorched earth next to the city's water treatment plant that is the
neighborhood's only "park." Nearly one year into her sentence,
Joycelyn is still confused and angry about what has happened. "I've
been working since I was 16 years old. If we'd been dealing drugs we
would've been staying in a brick house and not in the same house I
grew up in. If we'd been dealing drugs I would've been driving a nice
new vehicle and not a 1992 Camry," she said during an August
interview at the women's prison unit in Gatesville. "If you ask me,
Bobby Bell is crooked and has been for a long time; he's taken it
[upon himself] to get rid of all the black people. They sent me to
prison because I am black and living in Jackson County."

Welcome to Belltown

Outside Jackson Co., Bell is probably known, if at all, as the
prosecutor who secured a death sentence for 18-year-old Ronald Ray
Howard, whose defense in court for the 1992 fatal shooting of Texas
Department of Public Safety Officer Bill Davidson during a traffic
stop outside Edna was that he'd been unduly influenced by gangster
rap lyrics. (Howard was executed on Oct. 6.) Inside Jackson Co., and
especially around the county seat of Edna, Bell's reputation is
legendary - and somewhat alarming. Many, and not only on the
eastside, snidely refer to Edna as "Belltown" - a place where Bell is
the king of the hill, and Jackson Co.'s only real power broker. "He
is. And if you ever cross him, for whatever reason, he has no
compassion," said one white resident, who for that reason declined to
be named. "You should see him operate in court; it's a show in and of
itself. It's a whole production, with that little smirk on his face.
. And people do what he wants - they're afraid of him. Everybody's
afraid of him."

Sitting behind a wide desk in his office on the second floor of the
featureless prefab courthouse in downtown Edna, Bell brusquely
rejected that characterization. On the wall behind him are oil
paintings of golf course holes (one of Pebble Beach, the other in
Minnesota); before him his ornate desk plate reads "Billy Bob DA." "I
don't think that's true; I reject your premise," he said, shifting in
his chair. "I am elected and serve [the voters]. If you don't want to
do the time, don't do the crime."

What people forget when "they're trying to lay it on me," Bell said,
is that he takes his cues from the voters - from those who cast their
ballots for him and from those who sit on his juries. Jackson Co.
jurors consistently vote to sentence defendants to an average 90% of
the maximum punishment, which, says Bell, has nothing to do with him.
Indeed, as evidence of his compassion, he says his plea offers are a
lot less time than 90%. "I don't think I'm being a hard case to offer
40%," he said. In the case of Operation Crackdown, he thinks the
sentences he offered were more than fair - including his refusal to
offer either Rick or Joycelyn probation for their first-time
offenses. He simply doesn't consider probation in any drug-related
case, he said, "because the juries don't ever give it."

Yet Bell's protestations are belied by the fact that after Joycelyn
pled guilty late last year, he indicted Rick Patterson yet again,
charging him this time with perjury, according to state prison
records - presumably for proclaiming his innocence at trial. Bell
told me that he doesn't actually recall the charge. "I'm not saying
it's not there," he said, "[but] I don't know."

To Bell, Rick's problem - and, by extension, Joycelyn's - is that he
hasn't accepted responsibility for his actions. "He never did - he
made no attempt to spare his wife, who is in prison by reason of his
drug dealing," Bell said. "He never said, 'I'll man up and tell the
public what I did.' I said, 'Look Frederick, just man up here.' We
got him three times; I said, 'I'll offer four years to run CC
(concurrently), and I'll dismiss on your wife.' But he wouldn't take it."

Bell rejects the possibility that Patterson refused to plea because
he was actually innocent. "What irritates me the most about Frederick
is that he was a Little League coach, and put himself out as a pillar
of society, all the while he's one of the biggest crack dealers in
Jackson County," he said. "When someone keeps insisting that they
didn't commit a crime - he has every right to do that, but I think
with Frederick Patterson it's to the point of ridiculous. I don't
care what [Patterson and his] family says.'"

Against the Law

How it is that Bell is so confident of Rick Patterson's guilt, and
certain of the fairness of a Bell-run Jackson Co. criminal justice
system, is a complete mystery to the Pattersons' current attorneys,
Joseph Willie and Jeff Blackburn. For starters, the use of Castaneda
as the lone "witness" to the alleged crack sales, bolstered only by
the dubious testimony of three convicted felons, simply isn't enough
to satisfy state law, says Blackburn. He ought to know: He helped to
craft the 2001 law outlining the standard for corroborative evidence
in police undercover drug operations. Often referred to as the Tulia
Law, it was passed in the wake of the notorious Tulia drug sting, in
which 39 defendants were convicted of selling cocaine to the state's
lone witness, a rogue drug-task-force "gypsy cop" named Tom Coleman,
who claimed to have written all of his investigative notes on his
leg, and who has since been indicted for perjuring himself during his
Tulia-related testimony.

In the wake of that debacle, state law was amended to provide that no
defendant could be convicted of dealing drugs in connection with an
undercover operation based solely on the testimony of a confidential
informant who is not a cop but is operating "under the color of law
enforcement," unless that testimony is corroborated by evidence that
does more than simply reiterate the allegation that a crime took
place. "Under the law ... undercover crackheads - informants, drug
users, rats - must be corroborated," said Blackburn, who agreed to
look into the Pattersons' cases, and into Operation Crackdown as a
whole, after being contacted by La'Trinda Patterson this spring. "I
looked in vain at these cases to find any form of corroboration.
[But] they are only corroborated [by] other people who have no
credibility whatsoever." In this respect, he said, the facts
supporting Edna's Crackdown convictions are even weaker than those in
Tulia. "These cases were not made by police officers, but by this
undercover drug user," he said. "That makes these cases less
reliable, and thus worse on facts than what was done in Tulia, where
at least they had the sense to hire a police officer - albeit a lying
police officer. In Edna they didn't even get a cop."

Indeed, not only had neither of the Crackdown cops, Repka and
Gabrysch, seen any of the alleged drug deals go down, but they also
lacked video or still surveillance photos to back up Castaneda's
detail-weak testimony. Nor did they have any other form of physical
evidence. Neither the Pattersons' home nor Rick's car was ever
searched by police, nor did law enforcement ever seek access to the
Pattersons' bank records. (Nonetheless, the state proffered as
evidence a lone photocopy of the drug-buy money police allegedly
supplied Castaneda copied before she set off to buy crack.) "That's
basically the way they do things in Edna" - they don't abide by the
rules, said Houston attorney Willie. "[Operation Crackdown] was
totally against the law."

Snow Fell on Edna

Bell says those assertions are absurd, and insists that the evidence
against the Pattersons was more than sufficient. There might not be
direct evidence that Rick Patterson ever sold drugs, he said, but
that doesn't mean he didn't do it. "If I go to bed and my grass is
green, and I get up [in the morning] and there's snow, I have no
direct evidence that it snowed," Bell explained mysteriously. "What
I'm saying is that ... if you [require] that [kind of direct
evidence] then you'll never get to prosecute. Circumstantial evidence
is [apparently] not enough for you," he said, his voice rising. "What
you're doing is trying to take the role of the jury and questioning
the integrity or reliability, or whatever, of someone [Castaneda]
telling the truth." Indeed, in court Officer Gabrysch resisted
Villafranca's suggestion that Castaneda might not be reliable. "[I]s
it fair to say that people that have a serious narcotics problem have
problems being honest?" Villafranca asked. "I would not say that,"
Gabrysch replied.

In a perfect world, Edna's law enforcers wouldn't have to use a
crackhead informant like Castaneda, says Edna Police Chief Clinton
Wooldridge. "It would be great if ... we had Harry Potter's invisible
cloak," he said, because Edna's too small for any of the roughly 20
officers employed by the Sheriff's Office and EPD to be able to work
undercover, and they just don't have the resources to hire an
undercover narc. The Texas DPS has an entire unit of narco officers
able to assist smaller counties with Crackdown-like operations, but
Wooldridge says he didn't think to ask, in part because he didn't
think DPS would actually be able to help. "They prefer to help you
instead of doing something for us" - like make the actual drug deals,
Wooldridge said. In short, for Operation Crackdown, he said, "we
didn't see the need" to ask DPS for help. "It seemed like it was
working just fine."

Ironically, regarding the failure to search the Pattersons' home or
to gather any other physical evidence against Rick Patterson,
Wooldridge and Bell say they didn't have enough probable cause to
legally gain access. They could've gotten a search warrant
immediately following each of Castaneda's alleged buys, but if they'd
done that they would've blown their whole operation, says Wooldridge.
Indeed, despite Bell's insistence that Rick Patterson was Edna's
crack kingpin, neither he nor Wooldridge were apparently willing to
risk losing any of the smaller beefs they'd had on the addicts to
whom Patterson presumably sold, in order to take down their kingpin
source. And there's just no way a judge would've signed a warrant to
search the Patterson home after Rick had been arrested, Bell said -
unless they wanted to do so "illegally."

In the end, Bell said he doesn't know whether Castaneda's court
testimony, explaining her motive for acting as a confidential
informant as a way to somehow keep herself off drugs, was actually
the truth. But in the final analysis, her motivation isn't important.
"I don't know whether to believe her or not," he said, "but that
[was] her logic."

A Closed County

Bell's steadfastness may seem defensive, but it doesn't surprise
Blackburn, La'Trinda Patterson, or many other black Ednans. Blackburn
dismisses Bell's explanations for the lack of solid evidence against
the Pattersons - and, by extension, the rest of the Crackdown
defendants - as "standard" yet "weak" excuses. "We're living in a
time where a satellite 10 miles up in the stratosphere can take a
picture of someone and can be blown up [so] you can see that the guy
is wearing a yellow shirt," he said. "To live in a time and age where
that is possible, and to say, 'We don't know how to get rudimentary
evidence,' or to suggest that [Jackson Co.] should be excused because
we're 'poor little Edna' is just ridiculous." He adds that while it
is true that law enforcement can't use "stale" evidence to obtain a
search warrant, it is also true, given their assertion that Rick
Patterson was a "major drug dealer," that they should've had enough
to get a warrant. "At best that is disingenuous," said Blackburn. "At
worst it is a load of crap."

Instead, to Blackburn, Edna's approach to eradicating drugs and
taking down dealers suggests motivations far from pure. "If you are
engaging in responsible law enforcement in drug laws, you target the
number one dealer, build a slow and steady case and then take him
down," Blackburn said. "If [your law enforcement] is politically
motivated, and you want to be re-elected, then you do what [Bell]
did: make a bunch of sloppy cases on users and then name a couple of
'kingpins,' from among those who are better-liked and
[well-respected] in the black community." That kind of "law
enforcement" is typical in rural Texas, Blackburn said. "It's
business as usual - a perverted function of the criminal justice
system: to make yourself look good by grinding up black and Hispanic
people. And it's all drug war shit; it's like an exile strategy [for
African-Americans] that they've worked out."

To La'Trinda Patterson, that assessment hits home. Rick and Joycelyn
Patterson owned their house, worked hard, were always willing to help
others, and often had at least some money left over each month. The
combination, she says, made them a clear target. "If you're black and
you own something, you're fortunate, and they don't like that," she
said. But that's the way it's always been in Edna, with several black
families - the Pattersons, members of the Robinson clan (especially
Jean and Olin) and Tracy Santellana, who owns the eastside mortuary
(the only remaining black-owned business in town) - standing out as
strong and well-respected, and thus, La'Trinda says, "targets" of
Edna's power structure.

Indeed, in recent months Bell has indicted Santellana as well as Jean
and Olin Robinson on charges unrelated to the Crackdown - and Jean
Robinson is certain the charges against her and Olin were motivated
entirely by her increasingly vocal opposition to Edna's status quo.
Jean says she started going to city council and county commissioners
meetings two years ago, after two black teens came to her complaining
of harassment by police. Black kids are followed, harassed, and
pulled over by police for no apparent reason, she says. And she's had
enough: "This is a closed county; they do what they want," she said.
"I'm not saying ... criminals should get off free, but we want the
same justice."

Robinson's message hasn't gone over particularly well, at least on
the whiter side of town. On May 8, Jean, her handicapped husband
Olin, and her sister Patricia Bryant were down the block from their
home after driving nearly two hours on their return from a family
gathering in Austin, when five police cars - including several
Jackson Co. sheriff's cars and two Edna PD cars - began following.
Jean says one may have had its lights on, albeit not the lead car.
Disconcerted by the show of force, she drove the final half-block and
into her driveway before stopping.

The police were not happy. They cuffed her and Olin, searched the
car, and would say only that the Robinsons were being arrested for
"resisting." Olin was later charged with assaulting a police officer,
after Olin's paralyzed hand hit a cop who was trying to get his arms
behind his back, and Jean is now facing two criminal counts, one a
felony charge of "evading arrest" - apparently for her failure to
pull over immediately. (According to the Edna Herald, the brigade of
police were trying to pull Robinson over for failing to stop at a
stop sign, failing to use her turn signal, and for having a "faulty
brake light." Robinson denies all three allegations.) The charges are
pending and Bell says he's therefore not at liberty to discuss the
case, but he assured me that he's "made her what are reasonable [plea] offers."

Thus far Joycelyn's appeals have been denied, and on Oct. 6, Rick's
appeal was denied by the 13th Court of Appeals in Corpus Christi. His
attorneys argued that the evidence used against him - Castaneda's
weak testimony, supported only by the equally questionable testimony
of the three plea-bargained go-betweens or "accomplice witnesses" -
was simply not enough to sustain a conviction. "At the outset, this
Court must decide a preliminary question of law: may an informant
corroborate the testimony of an accomplice, and vice versa?" Justice
Dori Contreras Garza wrote for the court. "No Texas court has
addressed this question." In the end, the court declared the
corroboration sufficient. "We are aware of the absence of guiding
case precedent in this area of the law, but we are confident that the
legislature would have combined the informant and accomplice
corroboration provisions if it had intended to prohibit an informant
from corroborating the testimony of an accomplice and vice versa."

So it goes in Edna - but perhaps not for much longer. At least that's
the hope of La'Trinda and her family. Undeterred by the Corpus
Christi decision, Blackburn and the small contingent of Texas Tech
law students who work with him through the West Texas Innocence
Project continue to research the Operation Crackdown cases. "I am
continuing my own investigation ... looking at patterns, and
preparing," Blackburn said.

La'Trinda says she is determined to see her hometown transformed into
a place that treats everyone fairly. "Home is not home, and it should
be somewhere you're proud to be from and would go back to. But Edna
is hell. There's nothing there; there's no way to advance yourself,
and you don't get a chance to. Nothing is fair there," she said. "I
have to do what I have to do so that these boys will quit messing
with the black people of Edna."

[sidebar]

'CRACKDOWN' BECOMES 'SHUTDOWN'

Although District Attorney Bell described Rick Patterson as Jackson
County's kingpin dealer, Patterson's incarceration has apparently
done little to curb Edna's drug problem ­ at least officially. On
Sunday, Oct. 9, Edna police arrested 13 more people in connection
with another undercover drug sting, this one code-named "Operation
Shutdown." Bell has so far indicted 25 people ­ most of them
African-Americans ­ in connection with the new sting, including
several who only recently completed prison sentences as a consequence
of Operation Crackdown. At press time, details of the Shutdown sting
were still unknown, although Jackson Co. sources say the charges are
based on the work of yet another confidential police informant.

[sidebar]

OPERATION CRACKDOWN CONVICTIONS

All of the Edna defendants were charged with at least one count of
delivery of less than one gram of crack cocaine. Seventeen were
charged with delivery inside a Drug-Free Zone (near a school), which
allowed the state to seek a longer sentence; 12 defendants had their
charges "enhanced" based on prior charges ­ in one case going back as
far as 1975 ­ for which they'd already served their time.

Jerline Robinson: 1 year

Tameka Robinson: 1 year

Kendra Dilworth: 1 year

Kevin Wayne Robinson: 1 year

Anthony Pernell Callis: 15 months

Myron Hardaway: 18 months

Joycelyn Patterson: 2 years

Joseph Hebert: 2 years

Lisa Robinson: 2 years

Jesse Darnell Chase: 2 years

Quincy Anderson: 2 years

Cassius Dewayne Clay: 3 years

Keith Levar Childs: 3 years

Acie Jones: 4 years

Frankie Jamel Brown: 4 years

Derrick Barnes: 4 years

Terrance Jerome Dilworth: 4 years

Toney Demetrice Dean: 5 years

Jeddrick Robinson: 5 years

Ira Donnell Dilworth: 5 years

Donovan Dwayne Dilworth: 6 years

Joseph Turner: 8 years

Rick Patterson: 10 years

Jovell Wallace: 15 years

Norris Lee Nollie: 16 years

Tvan Bryant: 20 years

Nikia Latrail Dilworth: 20 years

Tanya Williams: dismissed

Shaina Weitz: unavailable