TULIA MAY SEE JUSTICE AT LAST

THE POINT -- Our Drug Laws Sometimes Create Unjust Situations.

The release of 12 people who spent as long as four years behind bars thanks
to the uncorroborated testimony of a single undercover drug agent working in
the little Panhandle town of Tulia suggests that with enough hard work and
solid evidence injustice can eventually be reversed.

Without changes in laws and the way they are enforced, however, similar
injustices could occur again.

What seems to have happened in Tulia is roughly this: Tom Coleman, an
undercover agent for a regional drug task force, worked for 18 months
putting people in jail for cocaine possession or sales.

Coleman claimed he bought drugs from the defendants; but, he worked alone,
with no audio or video, and found no drugs or money during the arrests he
made. Still, he was supported by his superiors, and juries were willing to
convict based on his word alone. Coleman arrested 46 people (39 of them
black) and 38 were convicted or accepted plea bargains.

Eventually a pattern seemed visible, and activists and journalists began to
listen to the families of those convicted, most of whom had no record of
drug use.

The U.S. Justice Department and Texas attorney general's office finally
investigated, the state's highest court ordered new trials, and the
Legislature passed special legislation allowing these 12 people to be free
on their own recognizance (the rest had already been paroled or released)
while the rest of the legal mess is sorted out. Coleman is under indictment.

Most of the media who eventually noticed this injustice have focused on the
racial angle -- most of the defendants were black, Coleman was white and
most of the jurors were white. That's probably a valid concern, but the
extent to which laws against possessing drugs invite this kind of abuse
deserve attention as well.

An important aspect of a "victimless crime" is not that it is literally
devoid of people -- relatives, friends, the user him or herself, sometimes
even strangers -- who can in some sense be viewed as victims of
out-of-control use of certain drugs, including alcohol. It is that in the
narrower legal sense there is no complaining victim, like a person whose
house has been burglarized, who is willing and even eager to call the
police, point out the crime, help search for clues, and keep calling to see
if the police have any leads on the perpetrator.

In crimes of possession of substances declared illicit, neither buyer nor
seller is likely to complain to the police, even (or especially) if he
thinks he has been cheated.

So the police have to use undercover informants (often career criminals
themselves) or undercover agents who can penetrate private places and use
deception to catch perpetrators.

This leads to law enforcement in which deception rather than honesty is
prized, and many instances of officers who become corrupt or go on the take.

And it can lead to officers who are willing to boost their "body count" of
those arrested through dishonest means. Tulia is by no means the only place
where such things have happened.

Laws that can be enforced only through undercover work and deception exact a
price both from law enforcement people who would prefer to operate openly
and honorably and from society at large, in decreasing respect for law and
its institutions.

Those who defend drug prohibition should be required to tell us just how
high a price they are willing to exact from others to pursue their desire to
control the lives of others.