On the morning of July 23, 1999, ten years ago tomorrow, doors knocked all over the South Side of Tulia, a small town of 5,000 in West Texas. The people knocking at the doors were police officers with arrest warrants. People were dragged out of their homes, in various states of undress, and then paraded up the courthouse steps to be arraigned. The media, having been tipped off about the arrests, were there, waiting to take pictures. The Tulia Sentinel, a local weekly paper, said that "Tulia's streets were cleared of garbage".
The charge? Selling drugs (primarily powder cocaine) to an undercover police officer named Tom Coleman. All told, 47 people were arrested, 38 of them African-American. Most would be convicted in the next three years, some to sentences between 50-300 years.
And it was all based on a lie.
When the dust settled, it became clear that Tulia would be a representative of the racism that still exists in our society, the failures of the drug war, the failures of our criminal justice system. Ten years later, I remember.
You see, Tom Coleman was a most unusual undercover officer. The testimony of Coleman was virtually the only evidence against most of the defendants. He had no second officer observing; no wire to get an audio recording of the sales; and the only notes that he took were notes on his leg (that he admitted were lost every time he showered). There were the supposed drugs that he purchased, but they weren't fingerprinted to show that he actually got the drugs from the defendants. He made the accusations in a town where the drugs of choice were crack cocaine and marijuana, not powdered cocaine.
There was more to Coleman than that, though. His previous jobs had turned out poorly; on two occasions, he'd left town with little notice, in both cases leaving his patrol car at his house and leaving debts all throughout the towns he'd worked in. His colleagues had found him to be dishonest, gung-ho and possibly suffering from mental illness. He had a history of using racist language. And to top it off, he had been charged with stealing gas from his previous county, and arrested during his undercover investigation.
Sounds like a poor witness, right? Yet the sheriff, Larry Stewart decided to keep the arrest secret to protect his investigation, and the district attorney, Terry McEachern decided to keep the information from defense attorneys. When the attorneys began to find out information out about Coleman's past, the judge, Edward Self, chose to exclude almost all of the information.
And the pattern became to become clear- mostly all-white juries sent the defendants away for huge sentences. Many defendants chose to plea out, knowing they could not get a fair trial in Swisher County.
After a few trials, however, Coleman's story began to unravel. One of the accused was able to show time cards from work showing he could not have sold drugs at the time Coleman alleged. Another had a bank receipt from Oklahoma City (300 miles away). Another of the accused was described as tall with bushy hair, when he was short and bald. Yet another was described as 6 months pregnant when she was not (and the police report had been redacted to remove this information).
Despite this, Tulia's authorities continued to press on with the cases. It took attorneys from Amarillo, the NAACP and other pro-bono law firms to finally get a habeas corpus hearing for four defendants, where all the inconsistencies were put on trial for all to see. Shortly thereafter, a settlement was reached, and eventually, nearly all the accused received a pardon from the Texas governor's office. Even so, many of them had spent 2-3 years in prison, their reputations in tatters, their chances of getting a job in their hometown nearly nil. And many of the residents of town still firmly believed that they were all guilty.
Now, some will say that some of the accused were not totally innocent, and in that regard they are correct. Some were users of crack cocaine, and it is possible that some of them were even small time dealers. Yet, none of them received a fair trial in Swisher County. And that's to our eternal shame.
I remember Tulia, ten years later.
I remember because it illustrates how corrupt police officers can ruin people's lives. By all indications, Coleman was on his own in Tulia. But his arrest was covered up by Sheriff Stewart and by people at the Amarillo Narcotics Task Force.
I remember because it illustrates how tenuous the right to a fair trial can be. How easy it is for a prosecutor to put aside his/her primary responsibility to find the truth and instead move toward unethical practices to get a conviction.
I remember because it illustrates the problems with electing judges. Judge Self, evidently a fair attorney when a defense attorney, became a much different person on the bench. When decisions are based on pandering to a voting public rather than fairness or the law, we've got problems. (It also shows how a little empathy might be a good thing).
I remember because it illustrates the problems we have with indigent defense attorneys. Much of the information could have been exposed by public defenders, but they were too poorly selected and paid, and many of the defenders (definitely not all) just went through the motions of defending their clients.
I remember because it illustrates how the media perverts "innocent until proven guilty". We've all seen media reports that say "the alleged killer", with "alleged" in a different tone of voice, making it seem perfunctory. The media has created an impression that if charged, people must be guilty. Granted, not all media goes to the level of "streets cleared of garbage", but the point still stands.
I remember because it illustrates the rhetorical idiocy of the "war on drugs". When there is a "war", there has to be progress in that "war". And often, it means cutting corners; it means seeking a quantity of convictions rather than a quality of arrests; it means trying to do whatever it takes to get more funding from state and local governments. These railroaded defendants are casualties of this "war".
I remember because it illstrates how far we have to come with race in our nation. Tulia was in the national media portrayed as an abberation of the Deep South, a vestige of Jim Crow. There's no doubt that there was, and is, racism there. I visited there two weeks ago helping a friend with thesis research he was doing. The person at the newspaper was totally unhelpful, the librarian marginally more helpful. It was clear though that the drug bust was something they wanted to go away. Not because of injustice- we heard that the real research to be done was "how many of them went right back to jail". They just didn't like the spotlight of the national media. But if the situation had been reversed- if these had been majority white defendants- you know that the justice system would have worked for them better than did for the Tulia 47.
But I have to think- Tulia is not the abberation as much as it is a reflection. People may not be as openly racist as they were before, but make no mistakes, we're not close to solving our racial problems. It's incidents like Tulia- and Jasper, and Jena, etc...- that prove to us how far we have to come. And it's not only in the South- even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an African-American man can be arrested for breaking into...his own home.
I remember for all these reasons.
But most of all, I remember, because the blame partially lies with me. I was an undergraduate at Texas Tech at the time, and I saw the story in the local newspaper. I had started to move much more to the left at that time, and was probably one of the more liberal people in Lubbock.
But on that day, even I thought, "they're probably guilty".
And that is why I bear the shame of Tulia. Ten years later, I remember Tulia. May we never forget.