Former Tulia drug agent found guilty of perjury

[Sparkle]

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2992665

LUBBOCK — The lone undercover agent in a sting that sent dozens of black people to prison on bogus drug charges in Tulia was convicted today of one of two perjury counts.

Tom Coleman was acquitted of testifying falsely in a 2003 hearing that as a sheriff's deputy he never stole gas from county pumps, but he was found guilty of saying that he didn't learn about the theft charge against him until August 1998.

Jurors were to begin hearing evidence in the penalty phase of the trial later today. Aggravated perjury is a third-degree felony and carries a maximum 10-year sentence and $10,000 fine.


Coleman arrested 46 people, most of them black, in the small, mostly white farming community of Tulia. He worked alone and used no audio or video surveillance, and no drugs were ever found, but 38 defendants were convicted or reached plea deals.


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This guy should serve the same amout of time that those innocent people served x 46.

[Gothmog]

1. This is great news

The Tulia drug busts and convictions were a travesty of justice, even for Texas. It had to be very obvious that this guy was a liar if Perry pardoned the people wrongfully accused by this man.

[DemoTex]

2. "The Texas Observer" broke the story on Tulia in their June 23, 2000 issue

Tulia Breaks!

The story we broke in our June 23 issue about a racially tainted drug sting in a small Panhandle town, and the highly suspect undercover agent who ran it, has officially entered the media food chain. It has now been digested by so many news outlets – beginning with Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now and ending with a front page story in The New York Times and a feature segment on CNN – that the carnivores at the top of the chain are now referring to the story in shorthand. The racially divided town, the questionable police work, the incredibly long prison sentences – it’s all just "Tulia" now. As in: "Tulia is as much a story about race as how the drug war has gone crazy." That’s from Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, quoted in Arianna Huffington’s syndicated column on October 9. From the Observer to the Times to the Texas Monthly, and in only four short months.

The big bust in Tulia, population 5,000, created a ripple through the state’s daily papers back in the summer of 1999, when the arrests occurred and the racial targeting of the sting (roughly ten percent of the town’s black population was indicted) became readily apparent. But the stories barely scratched the surface, and nobody seemed to be asking the biggest question of all: could there really be 43 cocaine dealers in a town the size of Tulia? By the time I drove to Tulia a year later, the story was completely moribund, deader than the news room at the Lubbock Avalanche Journal. My contact in Tulia told me she had tried in vain for months – as one defendant after another received staggering sentences for delivering tiny amounts of cocaine, in cases built on the scantest of evidence – to get just one major daily to come out and take a closer look at the story. Nobody would bite.

And what a story it was. Defense attorneys had put together a damning file on the undercover agent, enough to cook his goose in any fair court of law. But the Swisher County judges wouldn’t allow the evidence to be heard. So the first airing of the laundry, and the first critical look at the drug war in Tulia, was in the pages of The Texas Observer. But not the last. A reader in Tulia noticed a pattern in the subsequent coverage, none of which, when it finally came, gave attribution to the Observer. "We were chatting Sunday evening at our meeting and I pointed out that all of these stories (including the New York and L.A. Times pieces) amount to little more than variations on a theme," he wrote me. "You set the pattern with your story and everybody largely rehashes what you laid out – only with less depth and attention to detail." We could not have said it better ourselves. Time magazine called the office just before we went to press to ask for permission to use a photo I shot for the Tulia story. "We’ll of course credit you for the photo," the editor assured me. And that’s the only place The Texas Observer will appear in your story, I thought. Gobbled again.

http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=718

The Texas Observer is a great liberal publication. This conviction would never have happened without the courageous journalism at The Texas Observer.

[Midnight Rambler]

3. Just perjury?

Are we to assume that he got away with the false arrests, and that the perjury charge is just the Al Capone syndrome? Or has the whole thing not gone to trial yet?

[Rose Siding]

6. I don't see why he isn't charged with perjury in each case

in which he gave testimony. He should do some time for every person who had to serve a minute based on his scheme.

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. kick

[pokercat999]

5. Jeezey Pete, if we prosecuted every cop that

perjured him/her self who would be left to "protect and serve"?

Guess we just don't get it. (sarcasm off)

[DemoTex]

7. Kick!

Important conviction here, folks. No, major conviction.

[David Zephyr]

8. How many Tulias happen without notice?

Tulia was not the exception. This creep almost got away with it because he had so many people helping him.

[DemoTex]

9. Tulia happens every day.

.

[hiley]

10. Tulia

is one of the rare cases that became exposed to the world.
How many are not ?

Because the arrested are poor brown or black people.

[Catherine Vincent]

11. Small town Texas

The authorities took the word from a lone white detective, with no hard evidence mind you, over these innocent men that were probably too poor to get proper legal representation. Sad.

[struggle4progress]

12. Boy, when Texas goes after lying racist mofos ...

... they don't really try very hard, do they?