A CONFUSED INQUIRY

Under pressure, and after a great deal of confusion among its own officials,
the U.S. Justice Department has said it will continue its criminal
investigation into a drug sting gone haywire in the Texas panhandle town of
Tulia.

Just last month, an adviser to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Lori Sharpe
Day, wrote in a letter to the president of the American Bar Association, "An
investigation of events in Tulia was conducted by the criminal section and
recently closed."

Those "events" included the arrests on July 23, 1999, of dozens of Tulia
residents on narcotics trafficking charges. Local authorities rounded up
more than 10 percent of the town's black population.

The arrests were the culmination of an absurd one-man "investigation" by Tom
Coleman, a narcotics agent who did not wear a wire or conduct any video
surveillance, did not keep detailed records of his alleged drug buys and
wrote such important information as the names of suspects and the dates of
transactions on his legs and other parts of his body.

After a series of columns in this space, an outcry arose and several public
officials asked the Justice Department to take action.

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, in a letter to Ashcroft, said: "This is
far worse than Keystone Kops police work. It looks more like deliberate
racial profiling, arresting and prosecuting with trumped-up evidence.
Officer Coleman's 'investigation' is more reminiscent of the Old South of
1962 than the New South of 2002."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton noted in a letter to Ashcroft that Coleman had
made criminal allegations against people who were subsequently shown to be
innocent. But most of the time his word was enough to send people to prison,
sometimes for astonishingly long sentences.

The "evidence" in those cases, said Clinton, "was simply the testimony of
Coleman. Yet any reasonable review of the public information made available
clearly establishes that Coleman's testimony in many cases was at best
inconclusive, and at worst constituted perjury."

In a direct plea to Ashcroft, Clinton said, "I implore you to reopen the
criminal investigation of Coleman as soon as possible."

As requests for some sort of action continued to come in, Justice Department
officials seemed baffled about the status of their alleged investigation
into the events in Tulia.

A criminal investigation of Coleman's activities was started two years ago,
when Bill Clinton was president. I called the Justice Department two weeks
ago to ask about the status of that investigation. A spokesman, Mark
Corallo, said it was continuing. I told him I had a copy of the letter from
Day to Robert Hirshorn, president of the Bar Association, saying the
investigation had been closed.

Corallo seemed surprised. He said that Day had probably been mistaken, but
that he would check. He called back and said, "Mystery solved!"

According to Corallo, the criminal investigation had, in fact, been closed,
but the matter was still under "review" by the civil rights division.

This week the official account changed yet again. In a letter to the editor
of The New York Times, the Justice Department's director of public affairs,
Barbara Comstock, said the information given to the Bar Association was
erroneous, and the criminal investigation "remains open."

"The department apologizes," said Comstock, "for any confusion resulting
from the issuance of that letter."

She said, "The criminal section is working expeditiously to review all of
the relevant evidence to determine whether to prosecute for federal criminal
civil rights laws violations."

If the department is serious about this matter -- and that remains to be
seen -- it will not limit its investigation to Coleman's activities. There
was an entire criminal justice hierarchy that worked in concert to send the
Tulia defendants to prison, including the district attorney who prosecuted
the cases, the sheriff who hired Coleman, and the regional narcotics task
force that trained and supervised him.

Federal investigators who are both honest and diligent will find plenty of
evidence of official wrongdoing waiting for them in Tulia.