A story I caught off of rotten.com ... This shit is fucked ... This is the whole story just the important part, the link is here http://imdiversity.com/villages/african/Article_Detail.asp?Article_ID=17415
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In Tainted Tulia Texas Drug Sweep, Lies Sent Blacks to Prison
TULIA, Texas (AP) - What happened here is not simply a study in Black and White, despite the skin colors of its characters. It is not purely a story of stupidity and arrogance, though both are prevalent.
It is a tragedy of small minds and made-up crimes that eventually created one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Texas history. If it weren't so awful, some of what happened in this tiny town might be comical, given the buffoonish protagonist and his inability to keep his stories straight.
Thomas Roland Coleman, the son of a locally famous Texas Ranger, drove into this dried-up place that looks in need of a long drink of water. He cruised the battered roads where Black people live. For 18 months, beginning in 1998, he said he was T.J. Dawson, a laborer whose girlfriend needed cocaine to get in the mood for sex.
He was really an undercover cop for a drug task force based in Amarillo, about 50 miles up the flat ribbon of Interstate 27. Coleman was allowed to work alone for The Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force. He kept no written records. No photographs were taken. No video was shot. No one observed his buys.
Every ensuing conviction relied on one thing: his word.
By the time he finished testifying, 38 people, 36 of them Black, had been convicted of selling small amounts of cocaine and sentenced to prison for as long as 90 years. For this, he was named Texas' outstanding narcotics officer in 2000.
Problem is, the star witness lied on the stand and several other places. Another problem - Swisher County District Attorney Terry McEachern, Sheriff Larry Stewart and District Judge Ed Self, who heard most of the cases, knew the witness had a long, tarnished record in law enforcement. That information was kept from jurors and from defense attorneys.
The arrests accounted for about 10 percent of Tulia's Black residents.
The Tulia cases have languished for four years. Last Monday, 12 people in state prison were released on their own recognizance pending a ruling on their future from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which could take as long as two years. Four others remain in custody.
Despite protests from members of Congress, promised hearings before a federal oversight committee and ongoing federal and state investigations, not one conviction has been overturned.
No action has been taken against officials from Swisher County or the regional task force.
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The state appointed two special prosecutors earlier this year to hold evidence hearings to determine if Coleman's testimony was indeed the sole basis for conviction in four cases. And to find out if county officials withheld information damaging to their star witness. The answer to both questions: yes.
Retired Dallas District Judge Ron Chapman - appointed after Self recused himself - stopped the hearings one day after Coleman took the stand, saying the former undercover officer was committing ``blatant perjury.''
A stipulation signed in May by the judge, the special prosecutors and defense lawyers working pro bono for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York, said all 38 convictions should be overturned, including 27 plea bargains signed to avoid lengthy prison terms.
Coleman is ``the most devious, nonresponsive witness this court has witnessed in 25 years on the bench in Texas,'' the judge wrote. Coleman also was a bigot who used the ``n'' word in front of task force supervisors while conducting an investigation against mostly Black suspects, testimony showed.
Examples of Coleman's repeated perjury, the document said, included testifying that he'd never been arrested ``except for a traffic ticket back when I was a kid'' and that he'd left previous law enforcement jobs ``in good standing.''
In truth, Coleman was arrested in August 1998, in the middle of the Tulia investigation, on charges of theft and abusing authority while a deputy with the Cochran County Sheriff's Office.
He'd walked off that job and skipped town owing more than $7,000 to local stores that extended credit because he was a deputy, and stole more than 100 gallons of gasoline from county pumps, documents and testimony showed. Charges were dropped when Coleman made restitution.
He'd also abandoned a previous deputy's post in Pecos County, just before he was about to be fired for lying, documents said.
The 129-page finding also faulted Swisher County officials for:
- Allowing Sheriff Stewart to testify that he hadn't received any negative information about Coleman ``despite the fact that he himself arrested Coleman'' on the Cochran County warrant.
- Portraying Coleman in court as an exemplary officer with no criminal record.
``It was a comedy of errors, it just wasn't one mistake,'' said Lubbock criminal defense attorney Rod Hobson, one of the special prosecutors. ``It was the task force, McEachern, Coleman, everyone involved screwed up, practically. And then covered it up and circled the wagons.''
Hobson is the kind of lawyer who keeps a loaded gun in his desk. He looks like he's seen the worst of the criminal justice system and isn't afraid to shoot it.
``If we handle drug cases this poorly,'' Hobson asks, ``what confidence do you have in all the people on death row?''
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In Tainted Tulia Texas Drug Sweep, Lies Sent Blacks to Prison
TULIA, Texas (AP) - What happened here is not simply a study in Black and White, despite the skin colors of its characters. It is not purely a story of stupidity and arrogance, though both are prevalent.
It is a tragedy of small minds and made-up crimes that eventually created one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Texas history. If it weren't so awful, some of what happened in this tiny town might be comical, given the buffoonish protagonist and his inability to keep his stories straight.
Thomas Roland Coleman, the son of a locally famous Texas Ranger, drove into this dried-up place that looks in need of a long drink of water. He cruised the battered roads where Black people live. For 18 months, beginning in 1998, he said he was T.J. Dawson, a laborer whose girlfriend needed cocaine to get in the mood for sex.
He was really an undercover cop for a drug task force based in Amarillo, about 50 miles up the flat ribbon of Interstate 27. Coleman was allowed to work alone for The Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force. He kept no written records. No photographs were taken. No video was shot. No one observed his buys.
Every ensuing conviction relied on one thing: his word.
By the time he finished testifying, 38 people, 36 of them Black, had been convicted of selling small amounts of cocaine and sentenced to prison for as long as 90 years. For this, he was named Texas' outstanding narcotics officer in 2000.
Problem is, the star witness lied on the stand and several other places. Another problem - Swisher County District Attorney Terry McEachern, Sheriff Larry Stewart and District Judge Ed Self, who heard most of the cases, knew the witness had a long, tarnished record in law enforcement. That information was kept from jurors and from defense attorneys.
The arrests accounted for about 10 percent of Tulia's Black residents.
The Tulia cases have languished for four years. Last Monday, 12 people in state prison were released on their own recognizance pending a ruling on their future from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which could take as long as two years. Four others remain in custody.
Despite protests from members of Congress, promised hearings before a federal oversight committee and ongoing federal and state investigations, not one conviction has been overturned.
No action has been taken against officials from Swisher County or the regional task force.
---
The state appointed two special prosecutors earlier this year to hold evidence hearings to determine if Coleman's testimony was indeed the sole basis for conviction in four cases. And to find out if county officials withheld information damaging to their star witness. The answer to both questions: yes.
Retired Dallas District Judge Ron Chapman - appointed after Self recused himself - stopped the hearings one day after Coleman took the stand, saying the former undercover officer was committing ``blatant perjury.''
A stipulation signed in May by the judge, the special prosecutors and defense lawyers working pro bono for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York, said all 38 convictions should be overturned, including 27 plea bargains signed to avoid lengthy prison terms.
Coleman is ``the most devious, nonresponsive witness this court has witnessed in 25 years on the bench in Texas,'' the judge wrote. Coleman also was a bigot who used the ``n'' word in front of task force supervisors while conducting an investigation against mostly Black suspects, testimony showed.
Examples of Coleman's repeated perjury, the document said, included testifying that he'd never been arrested ``except for a traffic ticket back when I was a kid'' and that he'd left previous law enforcement jobs ``in good standing.''
In truth, Coleman was arrested in August 1998, in the middle of the Tulia investigation, on charges of theft and abusing authority while a deputy with the Cochran County Sheriff's Office.
He'd walked off that job and skipped town owing more than $7,000 to local stores that extended credit because he was a deputy, and stole more than 100 gallons of gasoline from county pumps, documents and testimony showed. Charges were dropped when Coleman made restitution.
He'd also abandoned a previous deputy's post in Pecos County, just before he was about to be fired for lying, documents said.
The 129-page finding also faulted Swisher County officials for:
- Allowing Sheriff Stewart to testify that he hadn't received any negative information about Coleman ``despite the fact that he himself arrested Coleman'' on the Cochran County warrant.
- Portraying Coleman in court as an exemplary officer with no criminal record.
``It was a comedy of errors, it just wasn't one mistake,'' said Lubbock criminal defense attorney Rod Hobson, one of the special prosecutors. ``It was the task force, McEachern, Coleman, everyone involved screwed up, practically. And then covered it up and circled the wagons.''
Hobson is the kind of lawyer who keeps a loaded gun in his desk. He looks like he's seen the worst of the criminal justice system and isn't afraid to shoot it.
``If we handle drug cases this poorly,'' Hobson asks, ``what confidence do you have in all the people on death row?''
