Pubdate: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 Source: Washington Post (DC) Page: A02 Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company Contact: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491 Author: Lee Hockstader Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htm (Tulia, Texas) TEXAS TO REVIEW TULIA DRUG STING AUSTIN -- Under mounting pressure, Texas Attorney General John Cornyn has ordered an investigation into a narcotics sting operation three years ago that resulted in the arrests of 43 residents of a small town, all but six of them black. Civil rights organizations have described the 1999 police sweep in Tulia, in the Texas Panhandle, as a racially motivated act. In a letter Monday to the Department of Justice, Cornyn said he was ordering the investigation "to determine whether state laws have been broken and what other action needs to be taken by state authorities." In a separate letter, he asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to assist his office in the investigation. Cornyn had previously refused to order an examination of the 1999 sting operation in Tulia, a town of 5,000, in which more than 10 percent of the town's black population was arrested. Fourteen are serving prison sentences of up to 90 years. In reversing his position, Cornyn, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by the retirement of Sen. Phil Gramm (R), said a "slow-moving" federal investigation had failed to determine whether state laws had been broken. Civil rights groups welcomed the state investigation but characterized it as a tardy response from a politician running for higher office. "This is too little and too late," said Jeff Blackburn, a lawyer in Amarillo, Tex., who represents many of the Tulia defendants. "The truth is that Cornyn is in a position to do a lot more than investigate; he's in a position to act. His office should assume control of these cases and agree with us that each and every one of these defendants deserves a new trial and a fair trial." Vanita Gupta, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York, said: "It was pretty clear from the get- go there was something wrong with these cases, and the attorney general's office has not said a word. He wasn't thinking about Tulia for the last three years. It's a political move designed to get him out of the hot seat." Cornyn told the Associated Press, "I became concerned things had gotten bogged down . . . the job of every prosecutor is not merely to convict, but to see that justice is done. There is no limitation to finding out what the facts are." He said the upcoming election had no influence on his decision. Civil rights groups have focused their criticism on a narcotics agent, Tom Coleman, who was working for the Swisher County Sheriff's Office when he engineered the arrests in Tulia after what he said was an 18- month undercover investigation of drug trafficking. Coleman worked alone, wore no wire, collected no video evidence, kept scant written records and produced little corroborating evidence at trials. He had little experience in undercover work and, in an interview broadcast on a Texas television station, acknowledged using racist terms in casual conversation. The convictions in the Tulia cases were based largely on his testimony. After the arrests, Cornyn named Coleman the state's "Lawman of the Year" for 1999. Although the Tulia case has provoked an outcry among civil rights groups and attracted the attention of national news media, including several pieces in recent weeks by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, it has not generated much political heat in Texas. Cornyn's Democratic opponent in the Senate race, former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, who is black, has not raised the case in any of the candidates' joint appearances. Still, civil rights groups are demanding additional action from Cornyn, Texas's chief law enforcement officer, to right what they characterize as a glaring wrong. Will Harrell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, urged Cornyn to open a grand jury investigation into the sting operation and to dismiss the convictions the sting produced. "Every day that goes by, those people languish in prison far from their families all over the state for something they didn't do," he said. "The attorney general needs to take over the criminal cases and make a couple of choices: Retry them or dismiss them outright." - --- MAP posted-by: Beth