NEWS MEDIA SHINE ITS LIGHT ON RACIAL INJUSTICE IN TEXAS

The story of how a Jacksonville lawyer helped free a Dallas man who
had been condemned to life in prison for what essentially amounted to
smoking a joint isn't just a tale of justice.

Strains of redemption run through it, as well.

Charlie Douglas, a personal injury attorney with Harrell & Harrell in
Jacksonville, gave more weight to his conscience than his wallet when
he took on the case of Tyrone Brown, who spent 17 years in prison
after a judge used a positive marijuana test to turn an armed robbery
conviction that netted $2 and no injuries into an excuse to confine
him for life.

When Douglas took up Brown's cause, he helped redeem his profession
from a reputation that unjustly tars all lawyers as being motivated
by greed more than fairness; of spending more time pursuing
million-dollar settlements from corporations than justice for people
like Brown, many of whom spend much of their lives fighting mean
streets rather than mean bosses.

What's more is that Douglas - who last month persuaded Texas Gov.
Rick Perry to grant Brown a conditional pardon - was pumped up about
Brown's case after seeing it on ABC's 20/20. A news story on a
penniless black man, who lived five states away, provoked Douglas to
get involved. Now that ought to redeem the purpose of journalism's
traditional role.

That role, one that continues to be distorted by the drive for
profits and the juggernaut of Internet influence, is to shine light
in dark places - in hopes that decent people like Douglas will see it.

And, when it comes to unjust sentences and punishments that reek of
racial bias, there is no shortage of dark places in Texas.

Nearly a decade ago, Tulia, Texas, became notorious when 46 people -
40 of whom were black - were arrested during a drug sting operation
conducted by a private informant who used no surveillance and
virtually none of the stuff that is the hallmark of competent police
work. That informant was later convicted of perjury.

Yet, when the black men who were sentenced solely on his word went
off to prison, so did 10 percent of the town's black population.

National outrage led to the release of most of the Tulia 46. Perry
even pardoned 35 of them.

Today in Paris, Texas, outrage is building around the incarceration
of Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black freshman who may languish in
prison until she's 21 for shoving a hall monitor.

Never mind that Shaquanda had no prior arrests, or that the
58-year-old woman she shoved (Shaquanda told The Chicago Tribune that
the woman shoved her first ) wasn't seriously injured.

Never mind that until the time she shoved the monitor Shaquanda's
disciplinary record consisted mainly of small infractions. She once
wore a skirt that was an inch too short, for instance, and she poured
too much paint into a cup in art class.

The judge - the same judge who sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to
probation three months earlier after she was convicted of arson for
burning down her family's house - insisted only hard time would do
for Shaquanda.

She and her mother disagreed. So they talked to the Tribune about it
- - and support has been pouring in. As it should.

Only the most hardened racist or someone who naively believes that
all judges are fair, all the time, would accept that seven years in
prison is just punishment for a teenage girl with no criminal history.

Or that a life sentence is a fair sentence for a man who smoked a joint.

What's happening in Texas, it seems, amounts to some manner of mass
racial profiling abetted by the drug war and fears of crime. Such
fears contribute to the demonizing of people like Shaquanda and
Brown, and create an atmosphere in which punishments that don't fit
the crime face few challenges.

Which is why when the usual avenues of justice close for people like
Shaquanda, Brown and the Tulia 46, it's important that others open.
One of those avenues is through journalism that sticks to its mission
of revealing how the system doesn't always work, or how, for some
people, things can go horribly wrong.

The other avenue is through the passion and outrage of people like
Douglas; people who can't casually absorb tales of blatant injustice
without figuring out how to fix it.

And who won't give up until they do.