THE TULIA STORY ISN'T OVER

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 Mr. Coleman's racist,
lunatic investigation are still locked in the hellish environment of
Texas state prison. And the lies that Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

Mr. 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 Mr. 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 referred to blacks as
"niggers," and had a widespread professional reputation as unreliable
and untrustworthy.

In short, Tom 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. Mr. 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 United States
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.

Tom 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 U.S.