TULIA'S INJUSTICE IS SYMPTOMATIC

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 town of Tulia, Texas, suggests that, with enough hard work and
solid evidence, injustice eventually can 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. But his
superiors supported him 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 Justice Department and Texas Attorney
General's Office finally investigated and the state's highest court ordered
new trials.

The Texas Legislature passed special legislation allowing these 12 people to
be free on their own recognizance -- the rest already had been paroled or
released -- while the rest of the legal mess is sorted out. Coleman is under
indictment.

Most of the media that eventually noticed this injustice have focused on the
racial angle -- most of the defendants were black, Mr. 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 will 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 if he thinks he has been
cheated. So the police have to use undercover informants, who often are
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 people's lives.