Look what Texas has given us over the past couple of years: George W, a rate of executions which puts us in the same league as Iran, Enron, and the Tulia racism/drug scandal.

You haven’t heard about the Tulia affair? It’s not Bob Herbert‘s fault. (NYT registration req’d.) In a series of editorials [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Herbert has exposed the plight of a large part of the black population of Tulia, Texas beginning on July 23, 1999. Ten percent of the town’s black population was rounded up and arrested on the unsubstantiated testimony of Tom Coleman, an undercover narcotics agent. Three years later, many of the people are still in jail. Until recently corrected, the US Justice Department has maintained that they completed a criminal investigation into this travesty and that the matter had been closed.

Meanwhile, Herbert’s spotlight on the matter has helped the groups working with the Tulia defendants to get some momentum going. The last defendant had her case dismissed when she was able to prove she wasn’t even in the same state when Coleman claimed he bought cocaine from her. The Swisher County DA has remained unrepentent about the arrests, but Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (running for the US Senate this November) is facing some heat over his claim that his hands are tied in disposing of the matter. This member of the staunchly “states’ rights” (pdf) Texas GOP has passed the buck, claiming the US Justice Department should intervene.

There has been some positive outcome from this whole horrible affair. Texas passed a law requiring that the testimony of a non-police officer in a drug trial must be corroborated by other evidence. The application of this law resulted in dozens of drug convictions being overturned in Dallas earlier this year, after it was discovered that the “evidence” in a string of cocaine busts was nothing more than ground-up sheetrock! And it has also led to increasing criticism of the extra-legal activities of regional drug task forces.