THE WHEELS OF JUSTICE

Tulia, Texas is a pretty nondescript town of 5,000 just down state Highway
87 from Amarillo in northwest Texas. It's the kind of place people are from
but has little to attract people to it. In this setting the wheels of
justice turned, but in the wrong direction.

In an 18-month sting operation, 46 people, 39 of them black, were arrested
in July 1999 and accused of possessing cocaine by undercover agent Tom
Coleman without any further corroboration. There was no audio, video,
paraphernalia, money or other witnesses.

From those arrests, 38 defendants were convicted or accepted plea bargains
solely on Deputy Coleman's word. Seven other cases were dismissed and one
person died before trial.

The first man convicted was a 60-year-old black hog farmer named Joe Moore.
He was sentenced to 90 years in prison. Many other defendants, seeing
Moore's sentence, pleaded guilty instead of going to trial.

But Deputy Coleman, who received the "Lawman of the Year" award for his
work in Tulia, was more than he claimed to be.

According to Wade Goodwyn's report on National Public Radio, one of the
early defense attorneys happened to ask Coleman if he had ever been
arrested. The deputy tried to dodge the question. It turned out he had been
arrested for stealing $7,000 in merchandise in Cochran County where he had
been a deputy before coming to Tulia.

Here's one half of the kicker. Coleman's boss, Sheriff Larry Stewart, was
the one who had to arrest him on the warrant from the other county - six
months into the sting operation. The sheriff and the county District
Attorney kept the arrest quiet after Coleman agreed to pay restitution to
his victims.

The second half of the kicker is that District Judge Ed Self, when he found
out about Coleman's arrest, after the third trial, sealed the information
and wouldn't allow defense attorneys to use it. More convictions followed.

It took years, but the wheels of real justice started to turn in the
opposite direction. The state appeals court sent four cases back because
they wanted to know if the convictions were based only on Coleman's testimony.

Judge Self was disqualified when he made comments to the local newspapers
(one opining that the defendants were "scum bags") that made it appear he
had already decided the defendants' guilt.

With an outside judge now on the bench, Coleman's testimony continued. It
got so bad the trial was stopped.

All sides agreed that Coleman's testimony could not be trusted. Here's why:
One of those arrested was in Oklahoma City at the time Coleman said he
purchased drugs from her. She had dated and timed receipts from
transactions to prove her whereabouts.

Another defendant provided time sheets showing he was at work when Coleman
said he was doing a drug deal with him. Coleman himself admitted to some
"mess ups."

On Monday, 12 of the defendants were released from prison and the person to
thank wasn't the ACLU defense team or the NAACP lawyers, but a white farmer
named Gary Gardner.

When Moore was arrested, Gardner knew something was wrong and started
writing letters. Moore had worked for Gardner and he called the charges
against him "ludicrous."

Finally, according to the NPR report, the state's "premier political
journal, the Texas Observer" got the story and soon others followed,
including the advocacy organizations.

There are several dynamics going on in Tulia. A retired minister, Charles
Kiker, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said, "We are isolated out
here. And perhaps the civil rights movement passed us by." But shopkeeper
Pat Devin said that while Coleman was "overzealous," some of the defendants
were guilty.

The wheels of justice moved slowly. Fortunately, in these cases they
started to move without the racial grease that had been applied by the
sheriff, his deputy, the judge and juries. And to cap it all off, if an old
white farmer hadn't been sensitive to the injustices, the wheels might not
have moved in the right direction at all. Who says there's no progress?
Charles E. Richardson's columns appear Tuesday and Sunday.