Pubdate: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN) Copyright: 2001 St. Paul Pioneer Press Contact: 345 Cedar St., St. Paul, MN 55101 Website: http://www.pioneerplanet.com/ Forum: http://www.pioneerplanet.com/watercooler/ Author: Paul Duggan, Washington Post Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htm (Tulia, Texas) SMALL-TOWN DRUG BUST SEEN AS EITHER OVERDO 'CLEANUP' OR 'RACIAL CLEANSING' TULIA, Texas -- By midday July 23, 1999, Tulia was abuzz with news of the biggest drug bust ever in this Panhandle prairie town. The jail was packed with suspects rounded up after a grand jury indicted 43 men and women for allegedly selling small amounts of cocaine to a sheriff's deputy in an undercover operation. Most townspeople, though not all, applauded the arrests. "I remember thinking, 'Well, good; it's about time,' " said Debra Earl, 47, a school system employee who later served on a jury in one of the cases. Earl is white, like most of the 5,000 residents of this community an hour's drive south of Amarillo. "Drugs were getting bad," said another white resident, Daryl Tucker, 48, who runs a company that builds bowling alleys. "Our town as a whole sort of told the sheriff, 'We need to clean up these drugs.' And he's been doing a fine job of it, I think." Black residents, however, had a far different reaction to the 18-month drug sting, which is the focus of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and an FBI investigation ordered by the Justice Department's civil rights division. Of the 43 people arrested, 40 were black -- about 17 percent of Tulia's small black population. Nearly every black person in town had a relative or friend on the indictment list. The ACLU lawsuit, filed in September, alleges that many of the cases were built on "false testimony and fabricated evidence." In a complaint to the Justice Department last fall, the ACLU called the undercover operation "an ethnic cleansing of young male blacks from Tulia." "If you ask me, they just wanted to take whatever was left of the black folks in town and run them all out, and they used the law to do it," said Cleveland Henderson, 25, who lost his job as a dishwasher after being indicted. Like others, Henderson, who is on probation, said he was falsely accused but pleaded guilty in a deal with the prosecutor because he feared getting a stiff prison term if convicted at a trial. Only five of the 43 people indicted had prior drug convictions, according to court records. Most were charged with multiple counts of selling one to four grams of cocaine to the undercover deputy, who alleged in many cases that the deals occurred near schools or public parks, increasing the potential penalty. The ACLU said there were no photos, independent witnesses or other evidence in the cases -- just the testimony of the white deputy, who worked unsupervised on the streets. Eight men were convicted at trials in Tulia last year by all-white or mostly white juries, and given penitentiary terms of 12, 20, 20, 25, 40, 45, 60 and 99 years, said Jeff Blackburn, an ACLU lawyer. Of those who made plea deals to avoid similarly long prison stretches, 14 were locked up. The stiffest sentence was eight years. The ACLU lawsuit alleges false imprisonment and other misdeeds by Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart, District Attorney Terry McEachern and the undercover deputy, Thomas Coleman, all of whom are white. Through their attorneys, the three men denied the allegations in the lawsuit and the Justice Department complaint. Coleman, who was hired by Stewart to conduct the sting, is now working elsewhere in Texas and could not be located for comment. Blackburn and other lawyers said some of the suspects acknowledged selling cocaine to Coleman, but in much smaller quantities than alleged and at times and places different from those sworn to by the deputy. Others who were arrested contend they were falsely charged because they are friends or relatives of people who met with Coleman. In all but a few cases, Coleman alleged that the suspects sold him one to four grams of powder cocaine, punishable by up to 20 years in state prison. Those who acknowledged dealing with Coleman said they sold him rocks of crack, a cheaper form of cocaine, weighing less than a gram, which carries a jail term of up to 18 months. "The drugs here were crack and marijuana," said Smith, echoing others in Tulia's black community. "I don't even know what powder looks like." A tiny rock of crack can be ground up and mixed with baking soda or other cutting agents to produce more than a gram of powder. Under Texas law, prison sentences in cocaine cases are based on the weight of the product, no matter how diluted it is. In the black community, Smith said, old friends who used to socialize nightly on corners and around the basketball court at Conner Park seldom get together any more. "We have to stay away from each other or else we'll get our probation revoked," she said. - --- MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk