By: Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
For several years in the 1990s, a tightly-knit gang of African-American drug dealers transformed Tulia, Texas, a small town of 5,000 halfway between Amarillo and Lubbock, into one of America's best-organized and most lucrative drug trafficking capitals.
Now, most of these black drug dealers belonged to families who had lived in Tulia's small black community for decades, and they seemed to be as bereft of money and as modest and sober in their habits as anyone in a town that is often described as "dirt poor."
But this clever disguise didn't for one minute fool one Thomas Coleman, a white law officer hired by the regional narcotics task force and the Tulia sheriff's department to go undercover and root out drug trafficking.
In 1999 Coleman gave his superiors something to crow about—the arrest of 46 people on substantial drug-trafficking charges. Most of those arrested were African-Americans. They made up nearly a tenth of Tulia's black population. The few whites arrested were friends of the blacks.
Trials were soon organized, with Thomas Coleman the sole witness against the defendants. Convictions quickly followed, and the sentences were harsh: 60 years for this defendant, 90 years for that defendant, 434 years for still another defendant. Other defendants, fearful of being sentenced to decades in prison, pled guilty and received shorter but still substantial time.
Justice had been served, the local prosecutor's office maintains to this day—even though:
No drugs were ever found.
No money that could be even remotely tied to drug-trafficking was ever found.
No weapons of the kind routinely used by drug-traffickers was ever found.
All prosecutors had was the word of Thomas Coleman—a man, as I wrote in a column about this case last September, with a distinctly checkered legal past and a well-known penchant for publicly referring to any African American as "nigger" because he declared the word was no longer "as profane" as it once was.
Some of those Coleman had accused escaped this travesty of justice because they could prove, via a cashed check in one case, and employee time sheets and an employer's testimony in another, that they were innocent of Coleman's claims.
Still another man arrested and charged was let go when he pointed out that he could not possibly be the tall black man "with bushy type hair" Coleman had said he was since, as could be plainly seen, he was short and balding.
But most of the other defendants had no such airtight protection against what Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist who first wrote about the case, described as "the nightmarish blend of incompetence and malevolence."
Now, thanks to publicity and the legal aid provided the defendants by private attorneys in Texas and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the legal system in Texas has a chance to reconsider—and reverse—the wrong done by Thomas Coleman and his overzealous handlers. A hearing has begun in Tulia to determine whether four black men convicted on Coleman's testimony should be freed because his testimony was false.
The accounts in news reports of Coleman's own descriptions of his undercover methods would make this case a farce if the lives of individuals and families weren't at stake.
According to a New York Times report, Coleman said he worked alone and never tape-recorded his supposed drug buys. Instead, when he bought drugs, he would "put them in my sock, and write down the time and the date, and if I had a street name, first name, subject in a green pickup truck, whatever I had—because I didn't know none of these people."
He wrote, he said, all of this on his leg.
The hearing has already had four law officials who had previously had some experience working with Coleman tell the court under oath such things as "I do not believe Tom Coleman is an honest individual," and "You just couldn't depend on what he told you."
The real question is why the prosecutor's office in Tulia, Texas ever thought and still thinks it should.
The wrong law officials in Tulia, Texas committed against law-abiding black citizens and some of their white friends is but another piece of the growing evidence that America's criminal justice system is riven with serious flaws.
Racial bias among police officers, prosecutors, juries and judges; toleration of poorly-prepared defense attorneys for indigent defendants; state legislatures' cynical decisions to build prisons in rural white communities in order to provide jobs and infusions of state funds to ease those areas' economic depressions, not fight crime, are just a few of the problems that deserve attention.
First and foremost, of course, there is the wrong of the death penalty, in which the accumulating instances of questionable convictions and convictions proved to have been wrong—that is, of men who were innocent of the crime for which they were charged and convicted—cry out for a national moratorium on the death penalty.
These issues are more than matters of legal precedent and process. They go to the heart of what Americans declare freedom and democracy involves and provides for individual human beings.
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