ulia is a hot, dusty town of 5,000 on the Texas Panhandle, about 50 miles south of Amarillo.Posted on 07/28/2002 9:58:44 PM PDT by gcruse
ulia is a hot, dusty town of 5,000 on the Texas Panhandle, about 50 miles south of Amarillo.
For some, it's a frightening place, slow and bigoted and bizarre. Kafka could have had a field day with Tulia.
On the morning of July 23, 1999, law enforcement officers fanned out and arrested more than 10 percent of Tulia's tiny African-American population. Also arrested were a handful of whites who had relationships with blacks.
The humiliating roundup was intensely covered by the local media, which had been tipped off in advance. Men and women, bewildered and unkempt, were paraded before TV cameras and featured prominently on the evening news. They were drug traffickers, one and all, said the sheriff, a not particularly bright Tulia bulb named Larry Stewart.
Among the 46 so-called traffickers were a pig farmer, a forklift operator and a number of ordinary young women with children.
If these were major cocaine dealers, as alleged, they were among the oddest in the U.S. None of them had any money to speak of. And when they were arrested, they didn't have any cocaine. No drugs, money or weapons were recovered during the surprise roundup.
Most of Tulia's white residents applauded the arrests, and the local newspapers were all but giddy with their editorial approval. The first convictions came quickly, and the sentences left the town's black residents aghast. One of the few white defendants, a man who happened to have a mixed-race child, was sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. The hog farmer, a black man in his late 50's named Joe Moore, was sentenced to 90 years. Kareem White, a 24-year-old black man, was sentenced to 60 years. And so on.
When the defendants awaiting trial saw this extreme sentencing trend, they began scrambling to plead guilty in exchange for lighter sentences. These ranged from 18 years in prison to, in some case, just probation.
It is not an overstatement to describe the arrests in Tulia as an atrocity. The entire operation was the work of a single police officer who claimed to have conducted an 18-month undercover operation. The arrests were made solely on the word of this officer, Tom Coleman, a white man with a wretched work history, who routinely referred to black people as "niggers" and who frequently found himself in trouble with the law.
Mr. Coleman's alleged undercover operation was ridiculous. There were no other police officers to corroborate his activities. He did not wear a wire or conduct any video surveillance. And he did not keep detailed records of his alleged drug buys. He said he sometimes wrote such important information as the names of suspects and the dates of transactions on his leg.
In trial after trial, prosecutors put Mr. Coleman on the witness stand and his uncorroborated, unsubstantiated testimony was enough to send people to prison for decades.
In some instances, lawyers have been able to show that there was no basis in fact — none at all — for Mr. Coleman's allegations, that they came from some realm other than reality.
He said, for example, that he had purchased drugs from a woman named Tonya White, and she was duly charged. But last April the charges had to be dropped when Ms. White's lawyers proved that she had cashed a check in Oklahoma City at the time that she was supposed to have been selling drugs to Mr. Coleman in Tulia.
Another defendant, Billy Don Wafer, was able to prove — through employee time sheets and his boss's testimony — that he was working at the time he was alleged by Mr. Coleman to have been selling cocaine. And the local district attorney, Terry McEachern, had to dismiss the case against a man named Yul Bryant after it was learned that Mr. Coleman had described him as a tall black man with bushy hair. Mr. Bryant was 5-foot-6 and bald.
In a just world, this case would be no more than a spoof on "Saturday Night Live." Instead it's a tragedy with no remedy in sight.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, the Tulia Legal Defense Project and a number of private law firms are trying to mount an effort to free the men and women imprisoned in this fiasco.
The idea that people could be rounded up and sent away for what are effectively lifetime terms solely on the word of a police officer like Tom Coleman is insane.
Herbert probably doesn't realize it, but the major Texas media outlets would harbor no compunction about exposing racism in Tulia -- if it existed. If this story happened as described, the Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston and Austin media outlets would be covering it like white on rice. Not to mention the Amarillo and Lubbock media.
Yet, after three years, this is the very first I've heard about the affair.
So, I'd like to see some corroboration before I buy into Herbert's allegations. Indeed, I wonder if Herbert himself has any corroborative material...
Federal Prisons are full of folks of all colors doing serious time for drug conspiracy in which no drugs were found. The NYT is only running with this for the race effect and because it's Texas and not Massachusetts. I wouldn't wager my life on Herbert's veracity.
Amen!
That will do. A FReeper being more trustworthy than Herbert, in my estimation.
Are the particulars as reported?
And is there any pressure coming from a.) the local media, and b.) the Texas justice system?
I'd hazard a guess, though, that what's going on there has absolutely nothing to do with racism, as commonly understood. And as Herbert would have everybody believe.
Instead, it was a community revulsion against casual disrespect for both the law and community standards, in general, and against teenage drug use, in particular.
That most of the perps were black was coincidental. It wasn't their skin color that got them in trouble, it was what they were doing (or other people were doing around them).
Still, it's a gross miscarriage of justice and a blot on the Swisher County escutcheon.
Now aside from those personal perspectives, I think that this Tulia case has/was handled poorly but Herbert and a number of other writers have editorialized reporting. Herbert makes the claim no drugs were found. No drugs were found at the time these folks were rounded up. Individual sales were logged...sloppily in some cases it would appear but the claim no drugs were found is misleading. Further, this claim that it's all about purging blacks from Tulia is weak. A number of the jurors who convicted these folks were in fact black. Were they all Toms? Herbert makes no mention of this.
Rightly or wrongly, he is exploiting this as a case study in racism and you have decided to carry the torch on this for your anti-WOD stance. I share more sentiment with your perspective/cause than his but I'm not absolutely anti-WOD either.
Au contraire. They were in fact
good citizens relying of phony,
faked-up testimony from the
'arresting officer' who took notes
on his leg.
Herbert makes no mention of this.
Is it a racist case? Would
Coleman have been able to
pull this off if it were whites
involved? I guess the answer
to that question has to come
from whether you think
race is a factor in what
people are predisposed
to believe.
Lower class black communities also tolerate a higher level of drug activity in their communities than do middle class communities of any race. That is also a fact even if unpleasant.
What raises my eyebrows over this particular case is that the drug cases involved powdered coke versus crack which I find problematic.
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