Arianna Huffington's column in the LA Times . . .

Crucible For The Drug War
Filed October 9, 2000

As Salem was to witch-hunt hysteria, so is the little town of Tulia, Texas, to our modern version of the witch hunt, the drug war. In his classic play ``The Crucible,'' Arthur Miller captured for all time how a mixture of fear, paranoia and bad laws led to a horrific miscarriage of justice in 17th-century America. To explore the 21st-century equivalent of this madness, someone -- David Mamet? Anna Deavere Smith? -- should dramatize what is going on in this rural community of 5,000, best known until now for its livestock auctions.

In July 1999, following an 18-month undercover sting operation, 43 residents of Tulia were arrested in an early-morning drug raid. Forty of them were black -- an astounding 17 percent of the town's entire African-American population of 232.

Almost all were charged with selling small of amounts of cocaine -- worth less than $200. But as the cases went to trial -- most without a single black on the jury -- and the convictions mounted, the sentences looked like something out of the Gulag-era Soviet Union. First-time offenders with no prior convictions -- which could have made them eligible for probation -- were locked away for more than 20 years. One man with a previous drug conviction was given 435 years in prison; another got 99 years.

By the end, Tulia had become a crucible for the drug war. These were clearly not big-time drug dealers. In fact, when they were arrested, no drugs, drug paraphernalia, guns or caches of money were found. Only a few could afford to make bail; none was able to hire a lawyer.

As Miller wrote about Salem: ``The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding.'' What happened to the 19 men and women convicted of witchcraft in eastern Massachusetts began with the accusations of children. The convictions in northern Texas were based on one accuser, Tom Coleman, a white undercover officer who was working as a welder when he landed the job in Tulia. His accusations were uncorroborated -- he had no audio tapes or video surveillance of his drug buys and no eyewitnesses to back up his version of events.

Only in an atmosphere of drug-war hysteria could so many rules of evidence be so willfully cast aside and institutions that would normally function as watchdogs become swept up in the frenzy. The morning after the arrests, the Tulia Sentinel described the suspects as ``known dealers,'' ``drug traffickers'' and ``scumbags.''

So much for a free press. And the presumption of innocence. And an untainted jury pool. As happened in Salem, the powers that be defined reality -- witches (drug dealers) are rampant among us -- and then identified those who had to be purged to protect all decent people. To dissent from the prevailing view was to join the outcasts.

Anything that did not fit into the preordained outcome -- including the many questions about the accuser himself -- was simply ignored. In the middle of Coleman's sting operation, the Tulia police received a Teletype with a warrant for his arrest from Cochran County, where Coleman had previously worked as a deputy sheriff. He had been charged with theft and leaving thousands of dollars in unpaid debts in his wake when he skipped town. Unlike those he accused in Tulia, he was never jailed and, shockingly, was allowed to continue conducting
the Tulia operation. In fact, his word continued to be trusted by the prosecution after he perjured himself by testifying that he had never been charged with anything worse than a traffic violation -- and even after one of the black men he accused was able to produce an unassailable alibi.

Yet the world would never have heard of Tulia had it not been for another man, Gary Gardner, a rotund, self-described redneck farmer and former cop with a fondness for salty language. He alone refused to stay silent. ``I just worked the facts, and the facts show that a lot of these people aren't guilty,'' said Gardner, who referred to one of the trials as a ``lynching.''

``There were moments,'' Miller wrote about Salem, ``when an individual conscience was all that could keep the world from falling apart.'' In the Tulia case, Gardner's conscience led to the story breaking wide open. And in late September, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit. The suit-- which the NAACP is joining this week -- charges local officials with``a deliberate plan, scheme and policy of targeting members of the African-American community'' as a way of ``removing them from the area using the legal system.''

Tulia is on its way to becoming a cause celebre, with front-page stories appearing in major newspapers this past weekend. A protest rally was held in front of the Texas state capitol, and the pressure is mounting on Gov. George W. Bush to take a stand.

As Evan Smith, editor of Texas Monthly, told me: ``There was a collective gasp in the state. Then again, this is a state in which James Byrd was dragged to death behind a pickup truck. Tulia is as much a story about race as how the drug war has gone crazy.''

On Friday, Bush called the drug war ``one of the worst public-policy failures of the '90s.'' This was supposed to be an indictment of the Clinton/Gore administration for not being tough enough. But as Tulia -- in the governor's own backyard -- chillingly proves, the problem is not that we are fighting the
drug war, as he put it, ``without urgency, without energy.'' It's that we are fighting it without logic, common sense, morality, fairness, justice -- and compassion.

``People were being torn apart, their loyalty to one another crushed and ... common human decency was going down the drain.'' That was Miller about Salem and the witch trials. But it could have been about Tulia and the tragic consequences of the drug war.

October 7, 2000 The New York Times

By JIM YARDLEY

TULIA, Tex., Oct. 4 On the morning of July 23, 1999, Billy Wafer, a forklift driver, was swept up in the biggest drug sting in local history: In this town of only 4,500 people, 43 suspects were arrested on charges of selling small amounts of cocaine. In some cases, hometown juries later meted out sentences ranging from 20 years to more than 300 years.

In Tulia, an isolated place ringed by cotton farms and cattle ranches on the high plains of the Texas panhandle, local officials declared the operation a stunning success. In all, 22 of the defendants were sent to prison while others received probation. The undercover agent at the center of the operation, Tom Coleman, was even named by the state as lawman of the year.

But more than a year later, an operation once hailed as a victory in the war on drugs now has civil rights groups and local minorities asking whether it was really a war on blacks. All but three of the 43 defendants were black, an enormous percentage considering blacks make up less than 10 percent of the town's population. In fact, roughly 12 percent of the town's black population was arrested.

The doubts raised about the racial makeup of the group arrested are compounded by contentions that the investigation was flimsy at best. The sole evidence in nearly every case was the word of Mr. Coleman, whose own character had come under criticism in the past. There were no videotapes or wiretaps or, in most cases, any corroborating witnesses.

"They declared war on this community," said Sammy Barrow, a black resident with four relatives who were arrested. "You either were going to get a long term in the penitentiary or you were going to get enough of a deterrent to get out of here."

So now Tulia itself is on trial: last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of a defendant whose case was dismissed in February, apparently because of a false identification. The suit accuses local officials of singling out blacks to run them out of town. Next week, the A.C.L.U. plans to file a civil rights complaint with the Justice Department seeking to revoke financing for the agencies that ran the sting.

The reaction among most whites here has been unflinching support of the operation and local officials. Public intolerance for drugs is unquestioned in Tulia; the local school system is one of a handful in the area that mandate random drug testing for students, a policy that is being challenged in court. The sheriff and the district attorney, who defend Mr. Coleman's credibility, also deny that the sting was racially motivated or that the town is biased.

"This is a good community, and I care a lot about everybody here," said Swisher County's sheriff, Larry Stewart, who was reluctant to speak in much detail because of the lawsuit. "There has been a lot more made of this than is true."

Like many places, Tulia is not immune to drugs. In 1997 and 1998, a total of nine people were arrested on felony drug charges here. In the previous two years, 32 were arrested in another sting by the Tulia police.

Some black residents say the town does have a cluster of crack cocaine users who buy their drugs in larger cities like Amarillo or Plainview. And several of the defendants had prior drug arrests, including Donald Smith, who admitted on the stand that he had sold crack to the undercover agent but who vehemently denied using or selling the more expensive powdered cocaine.

But Mr. Wafer, the forklift driver, contends, "there's no big drug problem here." "Can you see 43 dealers surviving in this small town?" he said. "There would be murders and everything. Everybody would have to be doing it."

Mr. Coleman said Mr. Wafer, 42, sold him cocaine at a local convenience store. But Mr. Wafer's employer testified that Mr. Wafer was at work at the time Mr. Coleman said the drug deal took place. Mr. Wafer produced his timecards. A judge refused to dismiss the cocaine charges but decided there was insufficient evidence to revoke Mr. Wafer's probation on a 1990 marijuana charge. His trial is pending.

The drug sting began in 1998 when Mr. Coleman, the son of a Texas ranger, was hired by Sheriff Stewart to run an undercover operation in Tulia under the supervision of the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force in Amarillo. Mr. Coleman had been a sheriff's deputy and a jailer in other Texas counties but was working as a welder when he got the job here.

Mr. Coleman underwent training with the Drug Enforcement Administration then spent more than a year undercover in Tulia, the largest town in Swisher County. Officials said Mr. Coleman, who is white, got to know many of Tulia's blacks with the help of a black co-worker at a cattle auction where he had gotten a job.

Both Sheriff Stewart and the local district attorney, Terry McEachern, agree that drugs are sold and consumed by whites and Hispanics in Tulia. But, they said, Mr. Coleman could not make any headway with those groups.

Critics say Mr. Coleman operated with almost no oversight. His reports were sometimes no more than a paragraph, sometimes with names misspelled. In some cases, Sheriff Stewart said, Mr. Coleman asked him for photographs of people he considered to be suspects; some black residents wonder if Mr. Coleman used the pictures in order to describe them in his later reports. The initial cases were tried at the Swisher County courthouse in Tulia. Seven cases went to trial, each ending in a stiff sentence. Usually, the charges involved the sale of between one gram and four grams of cocaine, a second-degree felony in Texas. But the penalties were increased on many of the charges because Mr. Coleman said the deals had occurred near a school or public park.

Some defendants who had no prior convictions were sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Cash Love, one of the few white defendants, was convicted of several counts of selling cocaine and sentenced to more than 300 years. Some blacks in town believe he was treated harshly because prosecutors did not want the operation to seem racist and because they wanted to make an example of Mr. Love, who has many black friends and a mixed-race child.

After the initial trials, other defendants began to plead guilty for reduced sentences or probation. Mr. McEachern regards these pleas as a validation of the operation. But many blacks say the defendants pleaded guilty because they did not believe they could get a fair trial here. The town's two newspapers had carried the story of the arrests on the front page, with the Tulia Sentinel, which is now defunct, describing the suspects as "drug traffickers" and "known dealers." Television stations, tipped by the sheriff, had filmed the suspects as they were taken to jail after the sunrise arrests.

"He paraded those people before the cameras with their skivvies and their hair uncombed like they had caught animals," said Gary Gardner, one of the few whites in town to publicly criticize the drug sting.

Despite the pretrial publicity, local judges denied motions for a change of venue. "Jurors are very, very conscientious in Tulia," Mr. McEachern said, defending the fairness of the trials.

The cases drew more scrutiny by the news media after Van Williamson, a court-appointed lawyer, began to look into Mr. Coleman's past. In 1996, Mr. Coleman had abruptly left the Sheriff's Department in Cochran County, Tex., leaving behind more than $6,000 in debts to local businesses. Sheriff Ken Burke of Cochran County wrote a letter to the state agency overseeing officer standards saying, "Mr. Coleman should not be in law enforcement, if he is going to do people the way he did this town."

Mr. Williamson also found documents from Mr. Coleman's custody battle for his two children that raised questions about his character. In interviews with social workers, some acquaintances and former co-workers at the Pecos County Sheriff's Department, where Mr. Coleman worked in the mid-90's, described him as obsessed with guns, hot-tempered and "a compulsive liar."

Ultimately, Mr. Coleman's problems in Cochran County resulted in misdemeanor charges of theft and abuse of official position involving gasoline from county pumps that was not paid for. Sheriff Stewart said he learned of Mr. Coleman's past problems about six months after the investigation had gotten under way and placed him on a week's vacation to clear up the matter. Mr. Coleman resumed his undercover work after paying off his debts with money provided by his mother, Sheriff Stewart said. Mr. Coleman, who is now working undercover in North Texas, declined to comment, on the advice of his lawyer, because of the pending civil lawsuit.

He did talk about one case shortly after the arrests but before any of the resulting controversy.

"I hate dope, and I hate dope dealers," Mr. Coleman told the Amarillo Globe-News in 1999. "I figured that doing this, I could maybe put a few dealers in jail before they came across the path of somebody's kid."

The information about Mr. Coleman's past was withheld in all but one of the Tulia trials. In that case, the defense brought up Mr. Coleman's troubles, and prosecutors called several Texas Rangers, who said he was a good, reliable officer.

Jeff Blackburn, the Amarillo lawyer handling the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, said the defendant in that case, Yul Bryant, had been accused by Mr. Coleman of selling $160 in cocaine. In his report, Mr. Coleman initially described Mr. Bryant, who is short and balding, as a tall black man "with bushy type hair." A later report amended the description to a "BM (black male) with short type hair." Mr. Bryant spent six months in jail before a judge dismissed the case.

"The question becomes, `Can you put anyone in question in rison based on the word of this guy without corroboration?' " Mr. Blackburn asked.

Now, attention on Tulia is growing. Groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice have organized protest rallies. On Monday, competing rallies are scheduled, one by critics of the arrests, the other by supporters of local officials. Indeed, many white residents cannot believe an officer would fabricate cases.

"I trust our officers," said Doris Ammburn, a local store clerk, "because if I can't, we're in pretty bad shape."

The New York Times