Can You Hear Me Now?

On the roadside billboards and church marquees of the Panhandle, religion is sold chiefly as a form of encouragement, and when you get out on Interstate 27 it?s easy to see why. Heading north from Lubbock, you soon find yourself in what is sometimes referred to as the Big Nothing: thousands of square miles of featureless high plains dotted with little towns whose very names?Friendship, Happy, Progress, Pep?seem to be a defense against the ominous feeling of being a lone body, without cover or companionship, in a plane that big and flat; a feeling of being conspicuously vertical, like a prairie dog caught too far from his hole with a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. Over the last two years, few communities in this area have needed uplift more than the people of Tulia, who have seen their town, and all its secrets, exposed to the glaring spotlight of the national news media.

When the Observer first reported on Tulia in June of 2000, very little had been written about the previous summer?s now-infamous drug busts. Our investigative report was a sort of perfect storm for drug policy reform advocates, neatly illustrating much that has gone wrong with the nation?s domestic drug war. The sheriff of Tulia, a ranching and farming town of 5,000 roughly halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo, had used grant money from the governor?s office to hire Tom Coleman, a gypsy cop with no experience in undercover work, and, as it was later revealed, a very checkered past. Coleman worked deep cover in Tulia for eighteen months with virtually no supervision, during which time he reported making more than one hundred drug buys, mostly small amounts of powdered cocaine, from no fewer than forty-six different dealers. Although the deliveries were small, an usually high percentage of them were alleged to have taken place near a school or a park, making them first degree felonies.

Coleman?s success seemed too good to be true, and it was. In not one single case did he wear a wire, nor did any second officer ever corroborate his claims with eyewitness or video evidence. When the arrests finally came, not one single suspect was found to be in possession of drugs or weapons. Perhaps most striking of all, forty of the suspects were black in a town with fewer than 300 black residents. Very few of the alleged dealers could afford to bond out of jail. Several were known to be crack addicts, people who had neither the money nor the connections to acquire powdered cocaine. In a handful of other cases, Coleman botched the identification of his suspects so badly that the charges against them were quietly dismissed. None of that seemed to matter to the district attorney or to the juries that heard the first half-dozen cases, pronounced the defendants guilty, and handed down sentences of up to ninety years.

Defenders of civil liberties, particularly the ACLU of Texas and the William Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice in New York, flogged the Observer story to everyone within range of a fax machine, and it gradually gained momentum; before long The New York Times re-reported it for page one. Yet nothing concrete came of the publicity?none of the jailed defendants were exonerated (though some were paroled)?and just as quickly the attention of the media dried up. Or it would have, had it not been for a series of columns this summer by Bob Herbert of the Times, whose better-late-than-never outrage resuscitated the controversy. Suddenly, two years later, the black residents of Tulia are once again being asked to give interviews to the broadcast and print media, and so are the local authorities, particularly District Attorney Terry McEachern and Sheriff Larry Stewart, who have learned by now to let someone else answer the phone when it rings. And the wheels of state government have finally begun to turn: Shortly after Herbert?s sixth column on the subject, Texas attorney general John Cornyn?in a hotly contested campaign for a U.S. Senate seat against, it should be noted, an African American?announced he finally supported a state investigation into the Tulia arrests. (He had been begged to investigate for more than a year.)