DRUG WAR TASK FORCES RUN AMOK

Ever heard of Tulia? It's a little town in Texas that was the scene of one
of the most shameful miscarriages of justice in modern American history - a
highly questionable undercover drug sting that in the summer of 1999 led to
the arrest of 15 percent of the town's black population.

And now the dismissal of charges last week against Tonya White, one of the
final two Tulia defendants, has finally kicked open the door on the dubious
nature of the entire Tulia operation while casting a light on one of the
many shadowy corners of the drug war: the power and abuses of drug task forces.

White was freed only after her lawyers uncovered a bank deposit slip that
proved she was in Oklahoma City, 300 miles away from Tulia, at the time she
was alleged to have sold cocaine to Tom Coleman, the controversial
undercover cop whose uncorroborated testimony was the sole basis for the
Tulia roundup.

Since the bust, Coleman's credibility has come under withering fire.
Branded a "compulsive liar" by former coworkers, Coleman was even arrested
for theft in the middle of the Tulia operation but, amazingly, was still
allowed to continue his undercover work.

But this story is about more than one small town and one bad cop, it's
about drug task forces allowed to run wild. An estimated 1,000 of these
autonomous special units are operating nationwide.

They came into widespread use in the 1980s as a way of combating America's
growing drug problem but have morphed into the rampaging mad dogs of the
drug war, operating with very little oversight or accountability.

Reports of their questionable tactics - particularly the use of unreliable
informants and a disturbing focus on poor, black drug users rather than on
big-time dealers - are widespread.

And it's taxpayer money that is paying for this wave of abuse, through a
federal grant program that has distributed billions of dollars to drug task
forces since its inception.

Making matters even worse is that this grant money is tied to the number of
busts a task force makes - the more arrests made, the more money received.
The result is a law enforcement mindset that elevates raw numbers over justice.

Combined with draconian asset forfeiture laws, the money-for-arrest model
has turned avaricious cops into drug war entrepreneurs, all too willing to
bend the rules in exchange for more money and power.

The more you look into drug task forces, the more you realize that the
shoddy police work exhibited in Tulia - shady narc, iffy suspect IDs, a
lack of corroborating evidence - is more the norm than an aberration.

"Everybody's talking about Tom Coleman," says Barbara Markham, a former
task force agent turned whistle blower. "Well, there are whole task forces
of Tom Colemans out there."

A very scary thought, given an undercover cop's ability to send someone to
jail for life solely on his word.

In Tulia, Coleman's word led to the conviction of 42 people, 16 of whom are
still in jail serving sentences of up to 435 years.

But despite the mountain of doubt raised about Coleman, the Tulia
prosecutor Terry McEachern continues to stand by his narc - dismissing
Coleman's lies about Tonya White as a mistake.

In reality, it's not a mistake - it's a smoking gun. One that Jeff
Blackburn, who represented Tonya White, hopes will ultimately lead to the
overturning of the other Tulia convictions.

To that end, he has created the Tulia Legal Defense Project and is about to
mount a campaign to get Texas Gov. Rick Perry to pardon the victims of the
Tulia sting.

Blackburn's efforts have drawn support from a number of national
organizations, including the NAACP, the American Bar Association and the
William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice.

It's time for Perry to join them and pardon the Tulia defendants, and for
the rest of us to take a much harder look at the abuses being perpetrated
in the name of the war on drugs.