TX-10: The complicity of Michael McCaul in the mass arrests of Black people in Tulia
On the early morning of July 23, 1999, in Tulia, Texas, nearly 33 percent of the city’s Black male residents were arrested.
Tulia, a sleepy town of 5,000 in the Texas panhandle, was shocked awake before dawn when 46 residents were roused without warning and dragged to jail, many still undressed from sleeping in their homes, some with no shoes. They were also paraded before a cavalcade of news cameras that had been alerted prior in order to humiliate the detained.
All were charged with dealing powdered cocaine based on the lone testimony of one white police officer. The white officer, Tom Coleman, who had a racist history of using slurs like the n-word, provided no fingerprints, no videos, no wire audio, no marked money, and no independent witnesses. Despite grossly inadequate evidence, and the absence of drugs, money, weapons, or other signs of drug dealing found on the accused, Coleman’s testimony produced 38 wrongful convictions — almost all Black residents — by all-white or mostly white juries, and condemned the convicted to a collective 750 years in prison. Many of those charged, most completely innocent, plead guilty just to receive a lesser fine, probation, or lower sentence.
Four years after the arrests, with 16 people still in prison, a district judge finally overturned all 38 convictions based on the uncorroborated and discredited testimony of Coleman. On June 16, 2003, after spending four years of their lives in prison for crimes they did not commit, 12 of those convicted — 11 of them Black — walked mostly free, still shackled by bail, but belatedly liberated to hug loved ones in fresh air and sunlight.
https://texassignal.com/the-complicity-of-sen-john-cornyn-and-rep-michael-mccaul-in-the-mass-arrests-of-black-people-in-tulia-texas/
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