Blow for Injustice

The scandal of Tulia is the scandal of the war on drugs.

Jacob Sullum from the May 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Blakeslee reports that the defense attorneys brought in by the NAACP created a chart that “demonstrated the sheer volume of people, many of them law enforcement officers, who would have to be lying in order for Coleman’s testimony to be true.” According to Coleman, they were all out to get him. He eventually got 10 months’ probation for perjury, a sentence that seems amazingly lenient compared to the terms imposed on his targets.

Yet this scandal is not simply about a rogue cop and the law enforcement officials who betrayed their duties by covering for him. Coleman’s incompetence and dishonesty would not have done as much damage as they did if he had been pursuing, say, bank robbers or arsonists. Instead, he was in the business of instigating the very “crimes” for which he later arrested people. Police do not commit murder to prevent murder; they do not steal to prevent theft; but they do buy drugs to prevent people from buying drugs, a situation that puts them above the law and encourages corner cutting. Coleman’s job consisted of getting people to trust him, asking them to get drugs for him, and then sending them to prison for doing him that favor. The only victims in these transactions were the people who ended up doing time for making the mistake of thinking Tom Coleman was their friend. And that’s if he did everything by the book.

If Coleman, under pressure to show results, invented some of these transactions or if he misidentified the people involved, how would anyone but the wrongfully accused know? There was no expectation of physical evidence connecting the perpetrator to the crime; there was no victim or other witness to say, “You’ve got the wrong guy.” A cop who was named Texas Officer of the Year for his undercover work in Tulia, the son of a widely admired Texas Ranger, says a known crackhead or an unemployed high school dropout delivered cocaine to him. The defendant, naturally, denies it. Whose story will a jury believe?

As Blakeslee concedes, the Tulia 46 were not uniformly innocent of drug dealing. Some, such as Billy Wafer and a defendant who had bank records to prove she was in another city when she supposedly sold cocaine to Coleman, had good alibis. Charges against several others were dropped after Coleman said he could not confidently identify them. But in interviews with an FBI agent who was investigating Coleman’s investigation, eight of the defendants admitted they had at least obtained crack for him.

Blakeslee reports that even defendants who admitted selling Coleman crack denied selling him eightballs of cocaine, and he remarks that it seems odd there would be so many powder dealers in a tiny community where smoking was the dominant method of consumption. He relates a defense theory that Coleman obtained the cocaine elsewhere, diluted it so it could be used as evidence in several cases (which would account for the cocaine’s unusual weakness), and kept the buy money he saved to help pay various debts.

The FBI reportedly found no indication that Coleman faked or tampered with evidence. But the suggestion is by no means outlandish. In a recent scandal involving the Dallas Police Department, 24 Mexican immigrants were convicted on drug charges after police informants planted bags of ground-up billiard chalk on them. Given the racial overtones of the Tulia cases, it’s worth noting that the officers and informants implicated in the Dallas scandal are Hispanic, like their victims.

Since drug law enforcement commonly involves creating crimes through sting operations, it’s not such a leap to create crimes by inventing them from whole cloth (or chalk), especially if you already suspect your target is a drug dealer. Former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara, now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, says the difficulty of connecting suspected dealers to drugs frequently leads police to lie about the circumstances or results of searches. “I’ve come to believe that hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests,” he wrote in a 1996 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, citing “testilying” scandals in cities across the country.

Meanwhile, Americans have been so bombarded with propaganda about the evils of illegal drugs that jurors are prepared to imprison someone who distributes them, even a penny-ante dealer or a drug user hooking up a friend, for years or decades. Texas, unlike the federal system, does have parole, with nonviolent offenders eligible after they’ve served one-fourth of their sentences, but the approval rate is only about 30 percent. So when a jury chooses a sentence of 20 years, 45 years, 60 years, or 90 years—all terms imposed on Tulia defendants for selling drugs to Coleman—the penalty is indeed heavy, if not quite as severe as it sounds. To some extent, the Tulia sentences were automatically boosted because defendants were charged with multiple counts, had previous offenses, or were accused of making deliveries in a “drug-free zone” (a designation that applies to half of Tulia). But jurors frequently picked sentences close to the top of the legally prescribed range. Notably, it was a white man who got the longest sentence: 361 years.

The prejudices such decisions reflect are more pharmacological than racial. Tulia is officially a dry town, but it’s clear from Blakeslee’s book that plenty of people there drink. It is entirely possible that some of these jurors, after deciding a defendant deserved a long stretch in prison for giving someone a few grams of cocaine, went home and unwound with a beer or a glass of whiskey. As long as Americans can do that sort of thing with a clear conscience, the story of Tulia will continue to play out all across the country.