FOR TULIA 12, 'IT FEELS SO GOOD'

Texas Inmates Freed After Four Years in Prison on Suspect Charges

TULIA, Tex., June 16 -- For the first time in four years, Kizzie White's
two small children got to hug and cling to her today, without anyone
interrupting to say time's up.

For the first time in four years, Joe Moore had precisely what he wanted,
in the order he wanted it: barbecued ribs and a long, soapy hot bath.

And for the first time in four years, Freddie Brookins Jr. started planning
his future again, one he hopes will include the college scholarship that
slipped from his grasp in 1999.

The three were among 12 people -- 11 of them African Americans -- who
walked free on bail today in this tiny Texas Panhandle town, after four
years in prison on drug convictions that a Texas judge and prosecutors now
agree were a travesty of justice based on the uncorroborated testimony of a
racist white police officer. Two weeks ago, Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill
allowing them to be released pending an appeals court's review, cutting
short sentences ranging from 20 to 90 years.

"It feels so good," said White, 26, who beamed as her daughter, Roneisha,
9, and son, Cashawn, 6, nuzzled her, staying close as magnets to the mother
they had seen briefly just eight times in four years. "I'm going to be the
best mother I can to them."

A few feet away stood Moore, 60, a hog farmer and gigantic man surrounded
by television cameras and supported by his lawyer. Illiterate, diabetic and
barely able to walk without the lawyer's aid, Moore, who was serving a
90-year sentence, clutched a grocery bag full of shampoo, conditioner and
soap, and declared, "Everything's all right now!"

If not quite a denouement, the release of the Tulia 12 was easily the most
dramatic turn in a case that began before dawn July 23, 1999, when masked
police officers began rounding up 46 people in Tulia, all but six of them
black. In a town of fewer than 5,000 people, the arrests represented nearly
10 percent of the black population.

In eight lightning-quick trials, juries with virtually no black members
handed down blisteringly tough sentences -- even though the sweeps turned
up no drugs, weapons, paraphernalia or other signs of drug dealing. That
convinced most of the other defendants to plead guilty, even though many of
them swore that they had never sold powdered cocaine to the undercover
police officer, an itinerant Texas lawman named Tom Coleman.

One other convict from Tulia is expected to go free this month, and three
others imprisoned on charges from other jurisdictions will remain locked up
for the time being. Of the 38 convicted, 25 ended up serving prison
sentences; nine of them had been released before today. While all the
convictions will stand until they are vacated by a pardon from Perry or
overturned on review, today's release was an earthquake for Tulia -- and a
resounding victory for the battalion of attorneys from Washington, New York
and Texas who donated millions of dollars' worth of legal work. The 12 were
released on their own recognizance. They had filed into the Swisher County
courtroom just before 1 p.m. wearing civilian clothes and a few fleeting
smiles, as if none believed that they were on the verge of freedom. Seated
in the jury box, they seemed a sort of reverse image of the white and
Hispanic juries that had convicted a number of them in the same courtroom.

At least 16 out-of-town defense lawyers and paralegals -- from the NAACP
Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York as well as white-shoe East
Coast firms such as Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, Hogan & Hartson and
Sullivan & Cromwell -- crowded into the courtroom. Those who spoke in
support of releasing the inmates on their own recognizance denounced the
Tulia busts as a symptom of systemic ills as well as a small-town legal
system gone haywire.

"It is because of a grave failure of the criminal justice system that these
people were robbed of four years of their lives," said Vanita Gupta of the
NAACP legal defense fund. Several also singled out Coleman, who Texas Judge
Ron Chapman in April concluded had "falsified reports, misrepresented the
nature and extent of his investigative work and misidentified various
defendants during his investigation." Coleman faces perjury charges
stemming from a separate case.

"Tom Coleman is a cancer," said Mitchell E. Zamoff, an attorney for Hogan
& Hartson in Washington. "The judge diagnosed the cancer two months
ago, and now it's time to remove the cancer before it spreads any further."

As the lawyers spoke, county Sheriff Larry Stewart, who had hired Coleman
and lauded him publicly as an honest professional, watched impassively by
the entrance to the courtroom. He declined to comment, other than to say
that Tulia has been unfairly portrayed as a racist, remote place --
repeating a widespread view among the town's white residents.

Chapman, a retired trial and appellate judge from Dallas assigned to handle
the Tulia case, recommended to Texas's highest criminal appeals court in
April that the convictions be thrown out. Today, he briefly lectured the 12
before him to "make better choices" and then freed them on bail.

The crowd in the courtroom burst into applause, and friends and relatives
mobbed the jury box, embracing and kissing the newly liberated.

Mattie White, 51, a prison guard and Kizzie's mother, who has been caring
for her two children since 1999, could not quite reach the box through the
jostle of cameramen and lawyers and well-wishers. But she watched it all --
not just Kizzie, but her son, Kareem; her brother, Willie Hall; and her
cousins, Timothy Towery and Jason Williams, who also were among the 12.
Together, Mattie White's relatives have been serving 165 years in prison.

Without high-powered lawyers and attention from the national media, she
said, "they'd have all still been in prison."

Defense lawyers urged their freed clients to seek new lives outside Tulia,
where many whites are bitter at the outcome of the case, believing most of
the imprisoned people to be guilty. "There's too much pain for them to live
here right now," Gupta said.

As part of a deal in April to move for the dismissal of the cases, Swisher
County paid $250,000 in return for an agreement that the 12 would not sue
county officials. From that sum, each of the 12 freed today is likely to
receive $12,000, with lesser amounts, ranging from $1,000 to $6,000, going
to those previously released who faced more lenient sentences.

But their lawyers said those amounts were a token of what would ultimately
be sought in damages. Once the criminal cases are resolved, said one
attorney, a rash of lawsuits is likely.

Nonetheless, nearly all those freed today, and many of their relatives,
insisted that they neither hated Tulia nor were bitter about what happened
- -- although they did acknowledge their anger at Coleman.

Moore, who spent the last four years folding socks in the prison laundry,
said, "I just want to go home, look at TV and stay out of trouble."