TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL LATE IN INVESTIGATING MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE

DALLAS -- Contrary to popular belief, sometimes late is, in fact, not
better than never. Sometimes late is nowhere near good enough. Sometimes
late is so obviously a case of one being pushed into doing the right thing
not by notions of morality and justice but by public pressure and political
expediency, that late amounts to no more than a display of poor leadership
and an insult to people's intelligence.

Case in point: Texas Attorney General John Cornyn's decision this week to
finally investigate mass arrests three years ago in a Panhandle town called
Tulia.

What happened in Tulia appears to have been an egregious miscarriage of
justice centered around a rogue lawman who worked alone, collected scant
evidence, and set out to lock up as many black people as possible on bogus
drug charges. Now, that could not have been easy in a 5,000-person town
with less than 500 black residents, but give Tom Coleman credit for being
dedicated to his task. The man who conducted the 18-month narcotics
investigation culminating in the July 23, 1999 drug sting didn't let little
things like the fact that individuals he fingered for crimes had ironclad
alibis -- such as being out of the state when the crimes were allegedly
committed -- interfere with good police work.

This one-man dragnet netted a catch of 46 town residents, 43 of them black
and the other three -- two Anglos and one Hispanic -- known to have close
relations with the town's black residents.

OK, maybe it's just me, but if I were a city official in Tulia back in July
1999, I might have asked myself if those numbers didn't fall outside the
realm of statistical probability. I might have been even more likely to do
so given what many town residents apparently knew about Tom Coleman, about
how this good ol' poster boy for the Old South had acknowledged, in a
television interview, using the "n-word" in both professional and personal
conversation. Coleman had been hired by Tulia officials as an undercover
narcotics officer even though he had little experience in such work.

Clearly, Coleman should not expect to be named the NAACP's "Man of the
Year" anytime soon. He'll get over it. After all, he already has one shiny
little knick-knack in his trophy case: the 1999 "Narcotics Officer of the
Year" award, presented to him just before the arrests by none other than
Attorney General John Cornyn.

As noted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert -- whose series of columns
may have applied sufficient pressure on Cornyn to help force the
investigation -- you won't find a photo of Coleman and Cornyn hugging
jowl-to-jowl in brochures coming out of Cornyn's U.S. Senate campaign. One
reason could be that the Republican -- in a twist of fate that Texas
Democrats must hail as a blessing -- is facing off against Democratic
nominee Ron Kirk, who happens to be black.

The fact that Cornyn is running against a black opponent in what has become
an increasingly tight race is another plausible explanation for why he
suddenly found religion and ordered the Tulia investigation, albeit three
years after the fact.

Cornyn had previously refused to conduct a state investigation, in
deference to what he said was a federal criminal investigation into the
matter. It turns out that the question of whether that federal
investigation was still open was, for a time, a bigger mystery than what
occurred in Tulia. First it was open, then closed, and then -- after a
Herbert column aimed at Attorney General John Ashcroft -- open again.

So where does that leave John Cornyn? In an awkward about-face. But he was
not put there by either politics or media pressure, he insists. Rather,
Cornyn told The Associated Press this week, he decided to open his own
investigation because he had "become concerned things had gotten bogged
down" in Washington. His first hint: When he recently asked the Justice
Department for information about its probe, his request was refused.

There's a campaign slogan for Cornyn: Send me to Washington, and I'll
un-bog things. Leave me in the Texas attorney general's office, and I'll
just be another regrettable example of a public servant who took an oath to
enforce the law and defend the little guy, and then couldn't manage to
uphold it.

A spokesman for Cornyn said Thursday that the attorney general saw no
reason for the state to intervene before now, and that it was Cornyn's
understanding all along that the feds were looking into the matter.

Maybe Cornyn belongs in the Senate after all. Who knows? He might be better
at making law than he has been in enforcing it.