FINALLY, JUSTICE IN TULIA

Officer Tom Coleman must have been gloating in the early morning hours of
July 23, 1999.

As 46 men and women were shaken out of their beds and paraded in front of TV
cameras in this small, rural town in the Texas Panhandle, Coleman seemed to
feel good about what he had just done as an undercover drug agent working
for the Swisher County Sheriff's Department.

He's not wearing much of a smirk today. Owing to a startling twist in a case
that has come to represent all that is misguided about the American drug
war, the truth about Coleman and what happened in Tulia has finally been
exposed.

At a special hearing on Monday, Dallas Judge Ron Chapman announced that
Coleman was "not a credible witness," and immediately recommended new trials
be granted for all who had been swept up and incarcerated after that
morning's drug sting. Within hours, the state's prosecution had agreed to
throw out all the convictions, admitting that the entire debacle had been a
"travesty of justice." Prosecutors said they would not retry the defendants.

After four years, the Tulia 46 are free.

Racial Overtones

The Tulia case attracted national attention because all of the early morning
arrests were made without drug evidence, audio or video surveillance,
corroborating witnesses, or comprehensive note-taking of any kind.

Out of the 46 arrests, 22 men and women received prison sentences -- up to
99 years in length. As if to confirm the guilt of those accused, over half
of the defendants wound up pleading guilty in exchange for probation or
somewhat shorter prison sentences.

In this mostly white Texan town, something that wasn't lost on anyone was
the fact that 40 of the 46 people arrested were African American -
comprising 15 percent of the town's African American population. (Curiously,
the remaining six were whites or Latinos involved in interracial
relationships.)

On its face, the racial overtones of the situation were so obvious that the
case soon attracted attention from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the U.S.
Justice Department (DOJ) and the State Attorney General's office. (The DOJ,
however, failed to call for a single oversight hearing or produce a single
report on the situation. It was New York Times columnist Bob Herbert who
finally seemed to light a tiny flame under their federal feet with his
outraged writings on the subject.)

Among those arrested in Tulia were many bright young adults with no criminal
histories to speak of, an elderly hog farmer, and single mothers who had
never left their own small town.

As the post-conviction appeals mounted, it was revealed that Coleman had an
extensive background of making racist comments about African Americans and
Latinos, in addition to past allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct,
and skipping out of town leaving unpaid debts.

Tip of the Iceberg

But what happened in Tulia -- or what was allowed to happen -- is far from
being an isolated case.

"It is really important for people to understand that this is not a case of
misconduct with respect to one rogue cop," explains Deborah Small of the
Drug Policy Alliance, which initiated a nationwide effort to bring attention
to the Tulia case. "Throughout the country, poor communities are victimized
every day by these same kinds of polices that provide incentives for [law
enforcement] to make as many arrests as possible."

"What happened to the people of Tulia should serve as a wake-up call,"
affirms Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute.

Indeed, Tulia should serve as a wake-up call, because the American drug war
has evolved into the most currently visible symptom of an absolutist
law-and-order mindset. It has sucked state and federal budgets dry and fed
an insatiable prison system; it has taken precedence over constitutional
rights to privacy, unreasonable search and seizure and due process -- no
matter what a person's color, class or creed.

The drug war, and the attendant concentration of power into the hands of
prosecutors and away from judges, individuals and their defense attorneys,
has become a full-blown frontal assault on the integrity of the American
criminal justice system.

It's time to call all of this for what it is, as Vanita Gupta of the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund says from Tulia: "A national shame."

"Tulia is just the tip of the iceberg," she adds. "We do feel victorious --
and hope that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms Judge Chapman's
recommendation -- but we also know that the problem is much deeper than what
happened here."

In particular, says Gupta, a careful accountability for how drug war monies
are used -- and to what effect -- is something that the DOJ needs to begin
to address in earnest, rather than doling out huge sums of funds and being
content to sit back as the drug arrest numbers soar.

The events in the Tulia case provide a stark example of the realities of
drug prosecutions all over the country," notes Jeff Robinson, president of
the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "Defendants are
often faced with the dilemma of asserting their factual innocence at the
risk of being wrongly convicted and serving horrendous prison sentences."

What Robinson describes is precisely what happened in Tulia, as dozens of
men and women watched with mounting horror as their neighbors and friends
were found guilty and received long prison terms. With hopes of eventually
being reunited with their families and having a semblance of a life after
incarceration, these Tulia residents pleaded guilty in exchange for more
favorable treatment from the prosecution.

Other Times, Other Tulias

Last fall, I watched one Tulia resident, Mattie White, stand in front of a
small room of reporters, struggling to find a way to put her grief into
words. Four of White's relatives were arrested that morning in 1999. A son
and a daughter wound up in prison, so far away from her that she had only
seen them twice in the years since their separation.

I watched as White, a big, strong woman -- a full-time prison guard herself
- -- trembled in front of the room. Mattie wanted nothing more than to be able
to see and hold her children who had been sent hundreds of miles away to sit
in isolated concrete cells.

Today, says Gupta, the mood in Tulia is different. Mattie White has hope
that she'll be reunited with her kids, and the lawyers who took on the legal
challenge in Texas feel good about what they've been able to accomplish.

For Mattie's sake, and for all those who worked so hard to expose the truth
in Tulia, we should be overjoyed. But everyone who has been touched by this
case knows that there are other Tulias out there and other mothers like
Mattie who also want their children to come home. And it's for their sake --
ultimately, for all our sake -- that the direction of the senseless drug war
needs to be stopped in its tracks.