New
York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
3/17/03
It has been some time since people here have had a good look at Thomas
Coleman, the former undercover police officer whose uncorroborated testimony
was all that supported a drug sweep in which more than a tenth of this
small town's black population was arrested.
On the morning of July 23, 1999, Mr. Coleman wore a ski mask as the people
he said he had bought drugs from were arrested in their nightclothes,
in front of television cameras. The trials that followed were brief and
businesslike, and after the initial sentences were handed down -- 60 years,
99 years, 434 years -- people started to plead guilty to shorter but still
substantial sentences without a chance to confront their accuser.
This week, Tulia will reacquaint itself with Mr. Coleman, now 43, in a
hearing to determine whether four black men convicted on his say-so should
be freed because his testimony had been false. It may be the first of
many such hearings; his reports in several cases have proved false and
his character and credibility have been harshly questioned by former law
enforcement colleagues.
The arrests and convictions in Tulia have become, for many, a symbol of
racial injustice. They have brought national attention to the way law
enforcement deals with poor minorities, against a backdrop so desolate
that the issues have been presented with pristine clarity.
John Nations, a state prosecutor brought in to handle the four cases,
was adamant in his opening statement today that the original prosecutor,
Terry D. McEachern, and other officials had done nothing wrong.
Mr. Nations said the inmates, who are serving sentences of 20 to 90 years,
cannot meet the difficult legal requirements to overturn criminal convictions
after appeals have been exhausted.
"These defendants one and all were guilty exactly as charged,"
Mr. Nations said. He added, "This is not a trial of Tom Coleman."
But it seems to be. The proceedings started with lawyers for the jailed
residents calling a parade of law enforcement officials who testified
to Mr. Coleman's poor character and odd conduct.
Ori White, the district attorney for Pecos County, who had litigated a
divorce case against Mr. Coleman while in private practice, said, "I
do not believe Tom Coleman is an honest individual." Mr. White said
Mr. Coleman owned an illegal machine gun and that he so feared for his
safety in the divorce case that he wore a bulletproof vest to court.
Bruce Wilson, who was the sheriff of Pecos County for 16 years and for
5 years in the early 1990's was Mr. Coleman's boss said, "You just
couldn't depend on what he told you."
Juan Castro, the police chief of Fort Stockton, said Mr. Coleman was "a
paranoid gun nut." Samuel Esparza, an investigator for the police
department there, testified that Mr. Coleman was a racist.
Mr. Coleman, who is now a private investigator, was not present today,
has an unlisted phone number and could not be reached for comment. He
is expected to testify on Wednesday.
The four defendants -- Christopher Jackson; Freddie Brookins Jr.; Jason
Williams; and Joseph Moore -- sat in the jury box today, which seemed
apt to many of the 50 spectators, about evenly divided between blacks
and whites. There was general amusement as the more than a dozen defense
lawyers who had arrived from Amarillo, New York and Washington to present
their cases jammed into the small courtroom.
"There's a hope now," said Freddie Brookins Sr., 49, who cuts
up cattle carcasses for a living. His son has been in prison for four
years.
His son's case is one of those under consideration this week by Ron Chapman,
an appeals court judge from Dallas who replaced the judge who oversaw
most of the trials. That judge, Edward L. Self, recused himself because
he had expressed support for the prosecution after the trials.
The older Mr. Brookins recalled the advice he had given his son.
"I asked him, did he do it?" Mr. Brookins said. "He said
no. And I said, if it was me and I didn't do it and they had to give me
100 years, you would give me 100 years" rather than accept a plea
bargain for a shorter sentence. Judge Self sentenced the younger Mr. Brookins
to 20 years.
About 5,000 people live in this dirt-poor town halfway between Amarillo
and Lubbock, perhaps 400 of them black. Tulia subsists on, as Sheriff
Larry Stewart put it, "a little bit of wheat, some cotton, some cattle."
It seems a particularly unlikely haven for large-scale drug trafficking.
Before the arrests, which literally decimated the black population, "people
got along here pretty good," said Thelma Johnson, 57, a cook, whose
nephew Dennis Allen is serving 18 years. "It was a calm kind of segregation."
That has changed, she said. "It seems to have become a black and
white thing since the drug sting."
In the end, 22 people were sentenced to prison, and 13 are still there.
Many others were sentenced to probation.
Mr. Coleman's work was supervised and paid for by the Panhandle Regional
Narcotics Task Force, which was financed by the federal government. Sheriff
Stewart said that Mr. Coleman was the first undercover agent he had ever
hired.
Mr. Coleman, who was named the state's Lawman of the Year in 1999, used
unorthodox methods. He worked alone and did not tape record his drug buys.
No drugs, weapons or large sums of cash were found in the arrests among
the network of drug traffickers Mr. Coleman said he had identified.
He described his methods in a 2001 deposition in a civil rights case brought
by one of the defendants in the sweeps, which the county later settled
for an undisclosed sum.
When he bought drugs, Mr. Coleman said, "I would put them in my sock,
and write down the time and the date, and if I had a street name, first
name, subject in a green pickup, whatever I had -- because I didn't know
none of these people." Whatever he had to go on, he said, "I
wrote on my leg."
Mr. Coleman was less than categorical when asked in the civil case whether
he stood by the truthfulness of his earlier testimony.
"That can be questionable," he said in his deposition. "I
mean, I have read over my testimony, and some of that stuff in there is,
like, totally out in left field."
Lawyers for the defendants say there is a name for that patch of field.
They call it perjury.
By last year, several of Mr. Coleman's cases had unraveled before they
reached a jury, and charges were dismissed. Tonya White was able to find
bank records to show that she was in Oklahoma when Mr. Coleman swore he
had bought drugs from her in Tulia. Billy Wafer produced timecards showing
he had been at work when Mr. Coleman said he had been selling drugs. Yul
Bryant defended himself by pointing out that he could not be the tall
black man "with bushy type hair" described in Mr. Coleman's
report. Mr. Bryant based this on the fact that he is short and balding.
Judge Chapman, using phrasing reminiscent of the Watergate scandal, told
the lawyers what he wanted to accomplish this week. He said he wanted
to establish what prosecutors knew and when they knew it.
What is clear is that by the summer of 1998, a year before the mass arrests,
an arrest warrant for Mr. Coleman arrived from Cochran County, where he
had worked as a deputy. It said Mr. Coleman was wanted on charges of stealing
county gasoline for personal use.
Sheriff Stewart promptly arrested his own undercover officer, bonded him
out on his own recognizance and told him to take a week's vacation. Soon
after, he took Mr. Coleman's word that everything had been set right.
The case was dismissed after Mr. Coleman made restitution of $7,000.
Juries did not hear about Mr. Coleman's own troubles with the law.
In his deposition, Mr. Coleman said he was merely a gun enthusiast. He
testified that he bought and traded guns and kept a small armory at home,
"just like," he said, "a regular, normal human being, Texan."
And in the deposition, Mr. Coleman for a moment turned philosophical.
"You know," he said, "in life you may have to burn some
bridges, but you don't burn them all the way down. You know, you might
have to cross that bridge one day again."
Here in Tulia, as Mr. Coleman prepares to recross a bridge that spans
many lives, people say it will not be any easy journey.
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