DON'T TOAST JUSTICE IN TEXAS JUST YET

A grand jury in Texas has indicted the ex-cop who conducted a slimy
undercover operation that devastated much of the black community in the
small Panhandle town of Tulia.

But we should hold off on the champagne toasts. The perjury indictment
against Thomas Coleman, a self-styled "deep undercover" narcotics agent who
concocted one of the worst criminal justice atrocities of recent years, is
not really that big a deal.

Thirteen of the people improperly targeted by Coleman's racist, lunatic
investigation are still locked in the hellish environment of Texas state
prison. And the lies that Coleman is accused of telling under oath were not
directly related to his investigation in Tulia, which has now been
officially discredited.

It would be outrageous if Coleman was nailed for perjury but the higher-ups
who enthusiastically encouraged his activities --- and prosecuted and
imprisoned his victims --- were allowed to escape all responsibility for
their actions.

Coleman's undercover operation and his uncorroborated, unsubstantiated
testimony led to the imprisonment of more than three dozen individuals,
nearly all of them black. When the defendants were rounded up in a
humiliating series of arrests on July 23, 1999, the police found no guns,
no drugs and no money.

The defendants were characterized as major drug dealers and vilified in
Tulia's small-town, racially charged environment. Some of the sentences
were extraordinarily, cruelly long --- 90 years and more.

It has since been shown that Coleman was a bizarre individual who fingered
people who were obviously innocent, scrawled important investigative
information on various parts of his body, had been in trouble with the law
himself, had once blown out the windshield of a patrol car with a shotgun,
had routinely used racial epithets to refer to blacks and had a widespread
professional reputation as unreliable and untrustworthy.

In short, Coleman was a clown, although a dangerous one. His activities
should be thoroughly investigated by competent authorities, and his
superiors should be investigated as well.

In Texas, the Tulia fiasco was characterized as a criminal justice triumph.
Coleman was hailed as a hero and presented with the state's "Lawman of the
Year" award by John Cornyn, who was then the state attorney general and has
since been elected a U.S. senator from Texas.

"Tulia is not just the story of a rogue cop," said Vanita Gupta, a lawyer
with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is handling the
appeals of several Tulia defendants.

Among the larger issues here are why this happened at all, who allowed it
to happen and why the law enforcement establishment refused to intervene
even after it was clear that a great injustice was occurring.

Coleman's activities were financed by the federal government. He was hired
and was supposed to have been supervised by the Panhandle Regional
Narcotics Task Force, one of the many federally financed task forces that
are supposed to be waging an all-out war against the scourge of drugs in
the United States.

The task forces in Texas are great examples of a drug war gone haywire.
They squander millions of dollars on amateurish investigations that snare
mostly low-level offenders, and they tend to focus like lasers on people
who are black or Hispanic.

The way the money is distributed by the Department of Justice encourages
the task forces to rack up as many arrests as possible, whether they are
quality arrests or not. The more people they arrest, the more money the
task forces get.

In Tulia, Coleman's capers were so freakish they became impossible to
defend. Last month the authorities threw in the towel. Prosecutors conceded
that they had made an awful mistake in relying on Coleman's uncorroborated
testimony and moved in court to overturn every conviction, including those
in which defendants pleaded guilty. (Some defendants, after seeing the
excessively harsh sentences being handed down, pleaded guilty in exchange
for more lenient punishment.)

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has the final say on whether the
convictions will be vacated. The decent thing to do at this point would be
to ease the suffering of the 13 individuals still incarcerated by releasing
them on bail pending the final ruling of the appeals court.

That would be the decent and honorable thing to do. But this is Texas we're
talking about.