You don't know fear until a kangaroocourt is deciding your life
I don't get upset when people badmouth Texas despite living here most of my god forsaken life. After all, there's plenty to badmouth! And if someone says, "Everyone in Texas is a goddam idiot!" I consider that more a reflection on the author of said statement than myself. But in the tale I have to tell today we see the very worst of Texas stereotypes come to life (along with a few shining lights), sending us over the rainbow and into a land of surreal hell where Alice herself would not dare to tread.
Excuse me a moment while I gather myself before my blood boils over so I can maintain a level of detached sarcasm. (OK, maybe not so detached.)
Here's a list of players in tonight's passion play:
Undercover Secret Agent Man Tom Coleman: Think of an evil Barney Fife with the lying pathology of a white trash Texas Ranger wannabe, the man with a mythic imagination.
District Attorney Terry McEachern: Now here's a prosecutor not even a mother could love - but a Soviet dictator sure could! He never met a truth he wouldn't deny - or a self-interest he'd deny either.
Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart: It's people like this that give snakes a bad name. Part snake and part snake charmer he never gives a direct answer to anything. "Is the earth round, Sheriff?" "You could say that." Why go on the record if the facts are just going to be used against you, huh?
Cvil Rights Attorney Jeff Blackburn: The Amarillo lawyer so disgusted by the Tulia Kangaroo Kourt system he took a leak on the courthouse monument to "Christian principles". He'd been fighting these backwater rural types for years. Click to read my hagiography of him I wrote last year.
Activist Attorney Vanita Gupta: A young, idealistic lawyer fresh out of law school itching for a fight. She joined the Legal Defense Fund and helped rally support across the country.
Tulia Farmer Gary Gardner: Tulia rabble rouser extraordinaire who created the Friends Of Justice group who got the initial word out. A man who can drop the word "nigger" without an ounce of hate but with a fierce devotion to truth and justice.
Freedom fighters: God bless all those who rallied to right the wrongs of dark minds bent on shattering lives - ranging from national figures to the Texas ACLU and even a hardy few citizens of Tulia - some of whom suffered excommunication for their efforts. As you will see, passions ran high on both sides and I suspect some of the wounds will never heal.
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People often mention the friendliness of Texas and when driving the farm-to-market roads on any given day will find you're waving back at complete strangers as they pass by on the road. See a car headed towards you and you better move your hand to the top of steering wheel so you can raise your fingers in acknowledgment lest you be deemed rude. It's a folksy little ritual and I have to admit I love it because I know there's a genuine feeling behind it - as long as you're one of "them", of course.
"Them" for the most part being white, Christian, conservative, gun totin', football lovin' denizens of darkness. These are people who live in fear of being "slandered" by the truth. They've pretty much got their minds made up on how the world is and what it should be and anything that destroys that illusion is simply ungodly and the work of the devil, a.k.a. liberals. So you can just imagine what happens to a black man accused of dealing cocaine by the son of a legendary Texas Ranger. Think "maximum sentence".
I've just finished reading Nate Blakeslee's outstanding book Tulia: Race, Cocaine And Corruption In A Small Texas Town. An Investigative reporter for the lefty magazine Texas Monthly, Blakeslee was one of the first to write about the Tulia scandal and lays out a thorough and riveting tale of the struggle to bring light to a dark corner of the world. It's a tale both heartening and disheartening and we'll start with the morning of the tragedy.
At dawn on July 23, 1999 the entire Tulia police force - all seven of them - along with every deputy in the Sheriff’s department conducted a sweeping raid on 46 alleged cocaina dealers - 40 of them black, arresting one of every three adult black males. And although caught by surprise and rousted from bed, no drugs or guns or signs of illicit profits were ever discovered. What was had that day was a delicious moral victory the pigs of the white establishment planned to feast on for years and years to come. This dream raid fed into every single hate, fear and prejudice of their tarnished hearts and pulling such a rich trough away from the feeding frenzy would prove a very difficult task - almost impossible actually.
Local farmer Gary Gardner already had a beef with the powers that be and smelled a rat right off. He mercilessly taunted the enforcement agencies with harried letters to the area papers trying to garner attention to the plight of the defendants. Meanwhile, the Tulia Kangaroo Kourt had a field day playing on the emotions of the white jurors describing horror stories of unattended babies as the hardened criminals plied their craft and reveled in their evil. As the cases flowed in, maximum sentences flowed out - 20 years for first time offenders. And God help you if you were accused of selling within 1000 feet of a school with sentences of 99 years doled out.
Many troubling questions were obvious besides the lack of evidence gathered during the arrest sweep. With so many dealers, who the hell were they all selling it to? And why were the charges for powdered cocaine and not crack, the actual drug that could be had in black Tulia? And from where did this huge influx of drugs come from? The answer to all that was in one Tom Coleman, described by one former supervisor as having "possible mental problems". Like a perverted James Bond, Coleman ran a loosely supervised undercover operation for the local area drug task force and it was on his word alone the arrests were made.
But Coleman was neither the super-lawman he fancied himself to be or a man of his word. His identification was sloppy, his documentation oftentimes a laughable paragraph scrawled in jabberwocky nonsense with many of his facts emanating solely from his imagination. But his father was a revered Texas Ranger and that pedigree was enough for Tulia law enforcement despite the fact Coleman left a trail across Texas of lies, disturbed notes and gross incompetence forcing him out of one town after another. (One town even called a meeting to decide how to get rid of him he was so loathed.)
But here is where something needs to be said of the whole drug task force concept which hands out monetary rewards for the number of arrests made. The incentive is to trump up charges and although the Tulia raid was an extreme example, false cases were being made across the country to beef the coffers of local law enforcement agencies. It's not that what happened in Tulia was a case of a few rotten apples, it's that it was inevitable a case of corruption like this would come along. Though not as high profile, many other incidents are also documented where rural prosecutors knew to feed the fears and false outrage of juries more concerned with self-justification than truth or justice.
The blanket arrests divided Tulia like never before and with the resulting publicity and influx of "Yankee lawyers", a bitter resentment welled up in the white community, leaving festering scars to this day. The more the unflattering facts came to light the more defiant the white partisans, desperately wishing for it all to just go away. Especially since the law-and-order persecuting attorney was a well-known drunk driver and even suffered a DWI conviction in Colorado. And a prominent local white farmer was caught on tape making homosexual advances to a teenage boy - probably the only sin worse than drug dealing. Yes indeed, they wanted that hated spotlight off of them and fast!
Tom Coleman's life was a nightmare wrecked by insecurities and inadequacies, his favorite tactic was to first accuse others of his own crimes in order to kill their credibility. How ironic. But in the vast, flat plains of west Texas, his Quixotic endeavors in Tulia paid off, earning him "Lawman of the Year" honors for engendering this brutal miscarriage of justice. As media examinations began to reveal glaring discrepancies in his accusations and the fact the cases were convicted on his word alone, a legal "dream team" assembled to uncover the truth.
The genius of Coleman's incompetence was that with so little documentation, what was there to refute? It was all a Texas Ranger's son versus lazy, gangsta darkies confrontation. A slam dunk for the persecutor. Extracting facts from the ensuing cover-up was a slow and agonizing teeth pulling process. But as facts surfaced, a picture formed of corruption, negligence and a blatant disregard of due diligence by all parties involved. Even then, without hard evidence, what could be done?
The cocaine turned in by Coleman from his drug buys was finally tested and revealed to be cut so many times as to have a purity rate of between 3 and 12% - virtually useless unless you wanted to get high on the cutting agent. This fit the theory of why the busts were for powdered cocaine: it gave Coleman the chance to cut his samples many times over allowing him to be compensated multiple times for the same alleged buy. Since most of the charges were for "eight balls" - an eighth of an ounce - he stood to reap thousands of dollars - this for a man chronically in deep debt. But it could never be proven.
A similar conundrum was faced by the defense team as each case always boiled down to a he said/he said argument of which they were bound to lose. In fact, seeing the harsh penalties laid out in the first few trials caused the rest of the defendants to plead out. It had taken a full two years to get the appeals rolling and without concrete proof their cases were sunk even with a mountain of evidence uncovered on Coleman on his highly suspect credibility - evidence previously disallowed in the original trials. Then a couple of breaks in the clouds came to turn the tide.
One female defendant had been working in Oklahoma on the day Coleman accused her of delivering cocaine to him. But she had no foolproof alibi. She finally returned to fight the charges, her case having never been adjudicated. But through the extreme thoroughness of Blackburn's assistant, a signed check receipt was unearthed in Oklahoma, providing the first hard proof of a Coleman lie. For the first time, persecuting attorney McEachern was forced to back down and dismiss a case. He knew he could bluff his way through any accusations against Colemen but now he was finally cornered.
The second victory was the recusal of the presiding judge in the original cases. This allowed the shocking evidence against Coleman's credibility to be entered into the record along with providing proof of knowledge of Coleman's character was hidden by the wayward Sheriff and persecuting attorney, thus invalidating the original convictions. Even so, an eleventh hour tactic was devised of foot dragging by the Swisher county team to test the will of the defense lawyers, many of whom had flown in from the east coast and were expending large amounts of money. However, outraged by the proceedings and the shocking conduct of the persecuting team, it was related in no uncertain terms the dream team would fight it out even if it took "years" to do it.
Finally, the dam broke. The rulings were reversed, 35 pardons were issued and the charade crumbled as a cause celebre in headlines across the country. In a widely quoted line, Evil Fife Coleman was described by the judge as "...the most devious, nonresponsive law enforcement witness that this court has encountered in twenty-five years on the bench." He was later convicted of perjury. Blackburn also successfully sued for a total of $6,000,000, but the process had left him with ulcers and the need for a long, healing retreat to Ireland. All's well that ends well, right?
Well, not so much.
The tragic and devastating War On People In The Name Of Drugs is still a huge machine of devastation despite the enormous victory scored in this one battle, causing state evidence laws to be changed as a result and moving the task forces under DPS supervision. A human court system is a fragile thing and without those with the integrity to see justice through, no amount of safeguards can keep a Tulia-like situation from happening all over again. Justice comes not from words on paper which can be discounted as so much ink if we deem it so, but from a reverence for life and from the realization that to falsely imprison our neighbors is to imprison ourselves. True justice serves the common interests of everyone and weaves the fabric to hold a society together in peace.
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If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
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All we have to do is dream...
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Further links:
In 2001, a protest rally was held in Tulia in support of the wrongly accused.
For a more in-depth read see this lengthy article from TruTv.
Here's a great recap on the tenth anniversary of the arrests and the lasting effects on Tulia, from the Amarillo Globe-News.
To see how abuses continue to this day, check out: StopTheDrugWar.org
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