WILL THE TULIA TRAGEDY HAVE A HOLLYWOOD ENDING?

America is a level playing field. So, naturally, college admissions
policies should never take race into account at all. At least that's what
the Bush administration argued in front of the Supreme Court April 1.

But instead of spending an enormous amount of time and effort obsessing
about African American candidates to the University of Michigan receiving
special treatment, maybe the White House should focus on a genuinely
pernicious form of affirmative action: the special treatment blacks get
when it comes to jail admissions.

The damning fact is that while blacks make up 13 percent of drug users,
they account for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 55 percent
of those convicted and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to
prison. Doesn't sound too much like Bush's shining ideal of color-blindness
to me.

If you want some harsh narrative to put flesh and blood to these harsh
numbers, cast your eyes on Texas, where a judge and special prosecutor
agreed last week to throw out every last conviction stemming from the now
notorious Tulia drug sting. This miscarriage of justice that saw roughly 15
percent of the small town's African Americans arrested in the summer of
1999 based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of Tom Coleman, a white
undercover cop with a shady past and a fondness for racial epithets.
Outrageously long prison sentences soon followed. But despite growing
doubts about Coleman's credibility and howls of protest from civil rights
activists, prosecutors stood by their narc -- and the Tulia defendants
languished behind bars.

All that changed last week when, following an extraordinary hearing in
which Coleman's integrity was shredded -- with former coworkers portraying
him as dishonest, untrustworthy and a racist, and Coleman himself labeling
his sworn testimony "questionable" -- presiding Judge Ron Chapman moved to
vacate the convictions. Which, in prosecution-friendly Texas, is the
equivalent of pointing out that not only does the emperor have no clothes
- -- he's got a really lousy body.

But it's not time to break out the champagne just yet. The judge's ruling
still has to be approved by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which has
a reputation for bending over backwards to uphold convictions.

So we need to keep the media spotlight on the case and demand that the
higher court affirm the judge's ruling. In the meantime, 13 people,
convicted on the testimony of an utterly discredited cop, remain locked up,
serving sentences of up to 90 years.

It's also important that we don't allow the powers-that-be to dismiss the
Tulia fiasco as an aberration -- and dump all the blame at the feet of a
single rogue cop. A system around that cop allowed him to be the catalyst
for the injustice.

Coleman was hired for the Tulia sting by the Panhandle Regional Narcotics
Task Force, one of an estimated 1,000 drug task forces operating across
America with very little oversight or accountability. "The Panhandle task
force," says Randy Credico of the William Kuntsler Fund for Racial Justice,
"was the beneficiary of Coleman's lies. The more arrests he made and the
more convictions he helped win, the more federal grant money the task force
received." In this corrupt, bucks-for-busts world, Coleman was a regular
cash cow.

And a quick check of the local papers shows there are entire task forces of
Tom Colemans running amok all across Texas, leaving behind a scorched earth
of illegal behavior, large-scale arrests of innocent people, and ruined lives.

There have been so many scandals associated with drug task forces deep in
the heart of Texas that it has prompted a bipartisan move in the state
legislature to abolish them. The effort is being championed by Jeff
Blackburn, the lawyer who spearheaded the Tulia appeals.

"We won a battle in Tulia," said Blackburn. "But the war will be lost if we
can't change what has become a badly broken system. Texas became addicted
to these task forces early in the game; maybe we can take the lead in
showing other states that it's possible to break that addiction." That
would be a nice switch -- seeing the Lone Star State leading the way in
something other than executions.

Drug task forces -- the attack dogs of America's drug war -- routinely
target African Americans. Getting rid of them would be the best kind of
affirmative action.