13 IMPRISONED IN TULIA DRUG SWEEP TO BE FREED TODAY

Racial Divide Still Deep In Texas Town

TULIA, Tex. -- It began one sultry summer morning four years ago, just
before dawn, when masked police officers swept through the poorest
neighborhoods of this sun-stunned rural town in northern Texas arresting
dozens of people on drug charges. By the time they were done, about a tenth
of Tulia's tiny black population was in jail and the town had been ripped
to pieces.

Many here -- black and white -- fervently hope it will all end this
afternoon, when most of the convicts still imprisoned from that
now-notorious sweep are expected to go free. Among the 13 is an illiterate
60-year-old hog farmer of no discernible wealth who was sentenced to 90
years for dealing cocaine based on the uncorroborated testimony of one
white undercover officer who has admitted to using racial slurs.

"It wasn't about drugs," said Freddie Brookins Sr., whose son Freddie Jr.,
a former high school football and track star with no prior criminal record,
received a 20-year sentence. "It was about getting rid of a group of
blacks, young males. I refer to it as ethnic cleansing."

Conceding that the lone undercover officer was unreliable and that the
arrests amounted to a travesty of justice, Texas prosecutors moved this
spring to throw out the 38 convictions that resulted from the 1999 sweep. A
judge agreed, and last month Gov. Rick Perry (R) signed a bill allowing the
remaining inmates to be released pending an appeals court review.

And so today, flanked by a phalanx of civil rights lawyers from New York,
Washington and Texas, they are to walk out of the same courthouse where
they were sentenced -- and straight into the glare of a national media circus.

"It's going to be a wild day, a tremendous day, a rejoiceful day," said
Brookins, 49, a thoughtful man with a gray goatee. "We've been waiting for
this for four years, and it's finally come."

A cotton- and grain-farming town of 5,000 people, Tulia is a flat, hot,
dusty place midway between Lubbock and Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle, a
part of the state sometimes called "the Big Nothing." Drought and low crop
prices have sapped the local economy; some of the town's grain elevators,
built by Italian POWs during World War II, are no longer used. The marquee
of the only movie theater in town advertises a show called "Fussin' an'
a-Feudin'," and the obelisk in the broad, silent courthouse square touts
Tulia as "a city with a future."

But the tenor of that future is now in doubt. The drug sweep remains a deep
schism running through this town, a barrier that is invisible but every bit
as divisive as the Berlin Wall.

At the center of the story of the sting operation is the undercover officer
who ran it, a slight, ponytailed, itinerant lawman named Thomas Coleman.
His 18-month investigation led to the arrests of 46 people, 40 of them
black -- even though he could supply no fingerprints, audio or video
surveillance or corroborating witnesses, and the busts turned up no drugs,
weapons, paraphernalia or other evidence of drug-dealing.

Much of the sting has been discredited. Coleman, 43, who later admitted to
using racial slurs and scribbling crucial notes on his leg, now faces
charges of lying under oath about stealing gasoline in 1998, when he was
working as a sheriff's deputy in another county. His background includes
leaving nearly $7,000 in bad debts before skipping town in a previous job
and failing to pay child support.

In a court-ordered hearing on the Tulia case in March, he gave rambling,
vague answers when challenged on his background, techniques and the scant
evidence he had presented. At one point he conceded that "there were some
mess-ups" in some of the Tulia cases.

But to many people in Tulia, Coleman arrested the right people. One who
believes that is Brenda Marshall, 48, who works at Dorothy's Good Ol'
Fashioned Food, a local eatery. She is so disgusted by the releases set for
today that she says she will not watch the television news tonight.

"I don't care what they say, my neighborhood's a lot quieter than it was,"
she said. She used to shop at a convenience store, but said, "I hated to go
there because of all the blacks that were out front. Now you don't have to
worry about them all being out there."

Her friend Debbie Earl, who served on the jury that sentenced Freddie
Brookins Jr. to 20 years, was torn about the trials, but is not contrite
now. She hated to condemn a young man to prison -- she had worked for years
at the high school with Brookins's grandmother -- but he had not been able
to prove his alibi, she said. She added that as a juror she knew nothing of
Coleman's checkered background, much of which the judge had sealed.

The view that some or many of those who were convicted were guilty and
deserved to go to prison -- even if the cases against them may have been
flawed -- appears widespread in Tulia, and it is not confined to the white
community. Many blacks are furious about what they say was a decision by
law enforcement authorities to target them in the sweep, but some concede
that drug use, especially crack cocaine, has been an affliction here.

"Some of them, they just got the wrong name on the wrong face," said
Elizabeth Yarbrough, 66, who is black and the grandmother of 14. "But some
of them, they deserved to be gotten."

But that is not the point, say defense attorneys, who have donated what
some estimate at several million dollars' worth of legal work to the case.
They contend that the arrests, prosecution and trials were the consequence
of a local legal system that preyed on poor, vulnerable defendants, a
determination to crack down on drugs with little regard for the niceties of
due process, and venomous racial stereotyping by small-town jurors.

For years before the 1999 busts, local newspapers dwelled on the drug
scourge, the clergy railed against it, politicians ran against it and law
enforcement officers promised to clean it up. After the sweep, one
newspaper applauded the crackdown on "scumbags." Lana Barnett, the
president of Tulia's Chamber of Commerce, told the Amarillo Globe-News,
"What we've got is a bunch of low-lifes who got caught and are whining
about it."

Lacking money to hire private attorneys, most of the defendants made do
with court-appointed lawyers. In the eight cases that went to trial, just
one of the 96 jurors was black; the others were white or Hispanic. The
sentences that jurors handed down ranged from 20 to 90 years.

Vanita Gupta, an attorney for the NAACP Legal and Education Fund in New
York who is handling the defense for many of the Tulia convicts, has
interviewed some of the former jurors. "There's supposed to be a
presumption of innocence," she said. "What we discovered is that there was
more a presumption of guilt. . . . It was a railroading of an entire
community in a very short amount of time."

The busts have left a bitter taste for many in the black community, which
numbers fewer than 500. Many blame the local sheriff, Larry Stewart, and
the district attorney, Terry McEachern, for protecting Coleman, portraying
him publicly as trustworthy and professional and arranging lightning-fast
trials that resulted in draconian sentences.

"We were poor black people, we couldn't get a lawyer," said Michele
Williams, 35, a mother of four who pleaded guilty and served a two-year
sentence, although she says she never used or sold cocaine.

Stewart, who hired Coleman, declined to be interviewed on the record about
the case, other than to say Tulia is "a fantastic community."

McEachern was convicted of drunken driving in New Mexico and was in jail
there last week.

A few whites in Tulia became champions of the people swept up in Coleman's
sting. They have been shunned by Tulia's white establishment, which is
resentful that the town has been painted as racist. Many whites in Tulia
seem to regard outsiders as the enemy. Others insist that if something went
wrong, it was all the fault of one rogue cop. Few acknowledge that innocent
people may have spent four years in prison.

"It depends what your definition of justice is," said the Rev. William
Guenther, pastor of the Assembly of God Church, who was foreman of a jury
that sentenced one man, Jason Jerome Williams, to 45 years in prison. "I
think he's being released according to the law. I think he was sentenced
according to the law. I look at it like the system worked."

The convictions of the 38, all but 10 of whom pleaded guilty after local
juries began handing down blisteringly tough sentences, will stand until
they are overturned by an appeals court or vacated by a pardon from the
governor.

As for the relatives of those who are to be freed today, they are
breathlessly excited. Michele Williams, who has several cousins who are to
be released, as well as a son- and daughter-in-law, is wondering how to do
her hair and what to wear to greet them. Freddie Brookins Sr. is planning
to take a week off work to be with his son. They might do some fishing.

"It's like a part of you has been missing," he said. "You go to work
thinking about it, you come home thinking about it, you go to sleep
thinking about it. These past four years, we've been incarcerated on the
outside."