Finally, Justice In Tulia

Officer Tom Coleman must have been gloating in the early morning hours of July 23, 1999.

As 46 men and women were shaken out of their beds and paraded in front of TV cameras in this small, rural town in the Texas Panhandle, Coleman seemed to feel good about what he had just done as an undercover drug agent working for the Swisher County Sheriff's Department.

He's not wearing much of a smirk today. Owing to a startling twist in a case that has come to represent all that is misguided about the American drug war, the truth about Coleman and what happened in Tulia has finally been exposed.

At a special hearing on Monday, Dallas Judge Ron Chapman announced that Coleman was "not a credible witness," and immediately recommended new trials be granted for all who had been swept up and incarcerated after that morning's drug sting. Within hours, the state's prosecution had agreed to throw out all the convictions, admitting that the entire debacle had been a "travesty of justice." Prosecutors said they would not retry the defendants.

After four years, the Tulia 46 may finally see justice served.

Racial Overtones

The Tulia case attracted national attention because all of the early morning arrests were made without drug evidence, audio or video surveillance, corroborating witnesses, or comprehensive note-taking of any kind.

Out of the 46 arrests, 22 men and women received prison sentences--up to 99 years in length. As if to confirm the guilt of those accused, over half of the defendants wound up pleading guilty in exchange for probation or somewhat shorter prison sentences.

In this mostly white Texan town, something that wasn't lost on anyone was the fact that 39 of the 46 people arrrested were African American - comprising nearly 15 percent of the town's African American population. (Most of the remaining seven were whites involved in interracial relationships.)

On its face, the racial overtones of the situation were so obvious that the case soon attracted attention from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and the State Attorney General's office. (The DOJ, however, failed to call for a single oversight hearing or produce a single report on the situation. It was New York Times columnist Bob Herbert who finally seemed to light a tiny flame under their federal feet with his outraged writings on the subject.)

Among those arrested in Tulia were many bright young adults with no criminal histories to speak of, an elderly hog farmer, and single mothers who had never left their own small town.

As the post-conviction appeals mounted, it was revealed that Coleman had an extensive background of making racist comments about African Americans and Latinos, in addition to past allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct, and skipping out of town leaving unpaid debts.

Tip of the Iceberg

But what happened in Tulia--or what was allowed to happen--is far from being an isolated case.

"It is really important for people to understand that this is not a case of misconduct with respect to one rogue cop," explains Deborah Small of the Drug Policy Alliance, which initiated a nationwide effort to bring attention to the Tulia case. "Throughout the country, poor communities are victimized every day by these same kinds of polices that provide incentives for [law enforcement] to make as many arrests as possible."

"What happened to the people of Tulia should serve as a wake-up call," affirms Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute.

Indeed, Tulia should serve as a wake-up call, because the American drug war has evolved into the most currently visible symptom of an absolutist law-and-order mindset. It has sucked state and federal budgets dry and fed an insatiable prison system; it has taken precedence over constitutional rights to privacy, unreasonable search and seizure and due process--no matter what a person's color, class or creed.