TEXAS TO REVIEW TULIA DRUG STING

AUSTIN -- Under mounting pressure, Texas Attorney General John Cornyn has
ordered an investigation into a narcotics sting operation three years ago
that resulted in the arrests of 43 residents of a small town, all but six
of them black.

Civil rights organizations have described the 1999 police sweep in Tulia,
in the Texas Panhandle, as a racially motivated act.

In a letter Monday to the Department of Justice, Cornyn said he was
ordering the investigation "to determine whether state laws have been
broken and what other action needs to be taken by state authorities." In a
separate letter, he asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to assist
his office in the investigation.

Cornyn had previously refused to order an examination of the 1999 sting
operation in Tulia, a town of 5,000, in which more than 10 percent of the
town's black population was arrested. Fourteen are serving prison sentences
of up to 90 years.

In reversing his position, Cornyn, the Republican candidate for the U.S.
Senate seat being vacated by the retirement of Sen. Phil Gramm (R), said a
"slow-moving" federal investigation had failed to determine whether state
laws had been broken.

Civil rights groups welcomed the state investigation but characterized it
as a tardy response from a politician running for higher office.

"This is too little and too late," said Jeff Blackburn, a lawyer in
Amarillo, Tex., who represents many of the Tulia defendants. "The truth is
that Cornyn is in a position to do a lot more than investigate; he's in a
position to act. His office should assume control of these cases and agree
with us that each and every one of these defendants deserves a new trial
and a fair trial."

Vanita Gupta, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund in New York, said: "It was pretty clear from the get- go there was
something wrong with these cases, and the attorney general's office has not
said a word. He wasn't thinking about Tulia for the last three years. It's
a political move designed to get him out of the hot seat."

Cornyn told the Associated Press, "I became concerned things had gotten
bogged down . . . the job of every prosecutor is not merely to convict, but
to see that justice is done. There is no limitation to finding out what the
facts are." He said the upcoming election had no influence on his decision.

Civil rights groups have focused their criticism on a narcotics agent, Tom
Coleman, who was working for the Swisher County Sheriff's Office when he
engineered the arrests in Tulia after what he said was an 18- month
undercover investigation of drug trafficking.

Coleman worked alone, wore no wire, collected no video evidence, kept scant
written records and produced little corroborating evidence at trials. He
had little experience in undercover work and, in an interview broadcast on
a Texas television station, acknowledged using racist terms in casual
conversation. The convictions in the Tulia cases were based largely on his
testimony.

After the arrests, Cornyn named Coleman the state's "Lawman of the Year"
for 1999.

Although the Tulia case has provoked an outcry among civil rights groups
and attracted the attention of national news media, including several
pieces in recent weeks by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, it has not
generated much political heat in Texas. Cornyn's Democratic opponent in the
Senate race, former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, who is black, has not raised the
case in any of the candidates' joint appearances.

Still, civil rights groups are demanding additional action from Cornyn,
Texas's chief law enforcement officer, to right what they characterize as a
glaring wrong.

Will Harrell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of
Texas, urged Cornyn to open a grand jury investigation into the sting
operation and to dismiss the convictions the sting produced.

"Every day that goes by, those people languish in prison far from their
families all over the state for something they didn't do," he said. "The
attorney general needs to take over the criminal cases and make a couple of
choices: Retry them or dismiss them outright."