Texas Cases Challenged Over Officer's Testimony

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.