KAFKA IN TULIA

Tulia is a hot, dusty town of 5,000 on the Texas Panhandle, about 50 miles
south of Amarillo.

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 U.S. 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 50's 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 case, 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 with a
wretched work history, who routinely referred to black people as "niggers"
and who frequently found himself in trouble with the law.

Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Coleman's allegations, that they came
from some realm other than reality.

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 Ms. 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 Mr. Coleman in Tulia.

Another defendant, Billy Don Wafer, was able to prove -- through employee
time sheets and his boss's testimony -- that he was working at the time he
was alleged by Mr. 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 Mr. Coleman had described him as
a tall black man with bushy hair. Mr. Bryant was 5-foot-6 and bald.

In a just world, this case would be no more than a spoof on "Saturday Night
Live." Instead it's a tragedy with no remedy in sight.

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.