AN ATROCITY OF ARRESTS IN A PANHANDLE TOWN

NEW YORK - Tulia is a hot, dusty town of 5,000 on the Texas Panhandle. For
some, it's a frightening place, slow and bigoted and bizarre. Kafka could
have had a field day with Tulia. On the morning of July 23, 1999, law
enforcement officers fanned out and arrested more than 10 percent of
Tulia's tiny African-American population. Also arrested were a handful of
whites who had relationships with blacks.

The humiliating roundup was intensely covered by the local media, which had
been tipped off in advance.

Men and women, bewildered and unkempt, were paraded before TV cameras and
featured prominently on the evening news. They were drug traffickers, one
and all, said the sheriff, a not particularly bright Tulia bulb named Larry
Stewart.

Among the 46 so-called traffickers were a pig farmer, a forklift operator
and a number of ordinary young women with children.

If these were major cocaine dealers, as alleged, they were among the oddest
in the United States. None of them had any money to speak of. And when they
were arrested, they didn't have any cocaine.

No drugs, money or weapons were recovered during the surprise roundup.

Most of Tulia's white residents applauded the arrests, and the local
newspapers were all but giddy with their editorial approval.

The first convictions came quickly, and the sentences left the town's black
residents aghast. One of the few white defendants, a man who happened to
have a mixed-race child, was sentenced to more than 300 years in prison.

The hog farmer, a black man in his late 50s named Joe Moore, was sentenced
to 90 years.

Kareem White, a 24-year-old black man, was sentenced to 60 years.

And so on.

When the defendants awaiting trial saw this extreme sentencing trend, they
began scrambling to plead guilty in exchange for lighter sentences. These
ranged from 18 years in prison to, in some cases, just probation.

It is not an overstatement to describe the arrests in Tulia as an atrocity.

The entire operation was the work of a single police officer who claimed to
have conducted an 18-month undercover operation. The arrests were made
solely on the word of this officer, Tom Coleman, a white man who routinely
referred to black people as "niggers" and who frequently found himself in
trouble with the law.

Coleman's alleged undercover operation was ridiculous. There were no other
police officers to corroborate his activities. He did not wear a wire or
conduct any video surveillance. And he did not keep detailed records of his
alleged drug buys. He said he sometimes wrote such important information as
the names of suspects and the dates of transactions on his leg.

In trial after trial, prosecutors put Coleman on the witness stand and his
uncorroborated, unsubstantiated testimony was enough to send people to
prison for decades.

In some instances, lawyers have been able to show that there was no basis
in fact - none at all - for Coleman's allegations. He said, for example,
that he had purchased drugs from a woman named Tonya White, and she was
duly charged.

But last April the charges had to be dropped when White's lawyers proved
that she had cashed a check in Oklahoma City at the time that she was
supposed to have been selling drugs to Coleman in Tulia.

Another defendant, Billy Don Wafer, was able to prove that he was working
at the time he was alleged by Coleman to have been selling cocaine. And the
local district attorney, Terry McEachern, had to dismiss the case against a
man named Yul Bryant after it was learned that Coleman had described him as
a tall black man with bushy hair. Bryant is short and bald.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the William Moses Kunstler
Fund for Racial Justice, the Tulia Legal Defense Project and a number of
private law firms are trying to mount an effort to free the men and women
imprisoned in this fiasco.

The idea that people could be rounded up and sent away for what are
effectively lifetime terms solely on the word of a police officer like Tom
Coleman is insane.