Pubdate: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 Source: Valley Morning Star (TX) Copyright: 2003 Valley Morning Star Contact: http://www.valleystar.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/584 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htm (Tulia, Texas) TULIA'S INJUSTICE IS SYMPTOMATIC The release of 12 people who spent as long as four years behind bars thanks to the uncorroborated testimony of a single undercover drug agent working in the little town of Tulia, Texas, suggests that, with enough hard work and solid evidence, injustice eventually can be reversed. Without changes in laws and the way they are enforced, however, similar injustices could occur again. What seems to have happened in Tulia is roughly this: Tom Coleman, an undercover agent for a regional drug task force, worked for 18 months putting people in jail for cocaine possession or sales. Coleman claimed he bought drugs from the defendants, but he worked alone, with no audio or video, and found no drugs or money during the arrests he made. But his superiors supported him and juries were willing to convict based on his word alone. Coleman arrested 46 people -- 39 of them black -- and 38 were convicted or accepted plea bargains. Eventually, a pattern seemed visible, and activists and journalists began to listen to the families of those convicted, most of whom had no record of drug use. The Justice Department and Texas Attorney General's Office finally investigated and the state's highest court ordered new trials. The Texas Legislature passed special legislation allowing these 12 people to be free on their own recognizance -- the rest already had been paroled or released -- while the rest of the legal mess is sorted out. Coleman is under indictment. Most of the media that eventually noticed this injustice have focused on the racial angle -- most of the defendants were black, Mr. Coleman was white and most of the jurors were white. That's probably a valid concern, but the extent to which laws against possessing drugs invite this kind of abuse deserve attention as well. An important aspect of a "victimless crime" is not that it is literally devoid of people -- relatives, friends, the user him or herself, sometimes even strangers -- who can in some sense be viewed as victims of out-of-control use of certain drugs, including alcohol. It is that in the narrower legal sense there is no complaining victim, like a person whose house has been burglarized, who is willing and even eager to call the police, point out the crime, help search for clues, and keep will calling to see if the police have any leads on the perpetrator. In crimes of possession of substances declared illicit, neither buyer nor seller is likely to complain to the police, even if he thinks he has been cheated. So the police have to use undercover informants, who often are career criminals themselves, or undercover agents who can penetrate private places and use deception to catch perpetrators. This leads to law enforcement in which deception, rather than honesty, is prized, and many instances of officers who become corrupt or go on the take. And it can lead to officers who are willing to boost their "body count" of those arrested through dishonest means. Tulia is by no means the only place where such things have happened. Laws that can be enforced only through undercover work and deception exact a price both from law enforcement people who would prefer to operate openly and honorably, and from society at large, in decreasing respect for law and its institutions. Those who defend drug prohibition should be required to tell us just how high a price they are willing to exact from others to pursue their desire to control people's lives. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh