A bright light on a dark corner of Texas

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.

http://none Dr. Michael J Brennan

That programme showed the worst type of racial unfairness and injustice that can occur in the US- smacks of the same type of treatment that can occur in NI or the UK- except in those places t/here are laws and groups and generally the police to protect. It represents the ignorance, duplicity, manipulation, dishonesty, lack of education and meanness, stupidity and all of the prejeudice associated with racism, that has to be ruining the reputation of that small town. it showed what could at best be termed ignorance and lack of education care and concern of the woman who sent someone down for 53 years. And the type of behaviour that is likely sterotypical of Texans, Mr Bush and what is expected of American Southerners There has to be a serious lack for concern for facts, ie no written facts – written on his leg and arm, try writing on your leg, or hairy arm- he should have been asked to demonstartae his technique. It is likely that a ball point pen would cease to flow with body fat, and likley be sore too? It also smacks of the regular aspects of racism. The local sheriff seemed to be several slices short of a peperonei pizza, neither professional, clever, or aware of checking out facts either and the CV od Tome Colman.
It infuriated me as I saw the same happen to blacks in the Us and to Nationalists in NI.
Humanity how are you. Such behaviur, is it any wonder people fear the likes of President Bushes lack of compassion for his own people never mind innocents or collaterasl damage of young Americans due to war.like soldiers sent over the tenches by Gernerals in WWI in Yreps and the Somme.
Dr. Michael J.Brenan