Blow for injustice: the scandal of Tulia is the scandal of the war on drugs

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, by Nate Blakeslee, New York: Public Affairs, 45-0 pages, $26.95

ON JULY 23,1999, Billy Don Wafer was arrested along with 45 other residents of Tulia, Texas, in a drug sting operation that would eventually attract nationwide attention. At the time of his arrest, Wafer, a warehouse foreman in his early 40s with a wife and two children, had nearly completed a 10-year probation sentence for marijuana possession, and if his probation was revoked he'd receive the full 10-year prison sentence. That decision would be made by a judge rather than a jury, in a hearing where the prosecution would have to prove its case by "a preponderance of the evidence" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt," the standard for full-blown criminal trials. "By the time a revocation reaches the hearing stage," Nate Blakeslee writes in Tulia, his absorbing, suspenseful account of the sting and its aftermath, "it is usually too late for the defendant."

The outlook for Wafer at his February 2000 hearing seemed especially bleak in light of what had happened to the four Tulia defendants who had already been tried. Like Wafer, each was accused of selling cocaine powder to an undercover cop named Tom Coleman, based on no evidence except his word. There were no videotapes, no audio recordings, no corroborating witnesses, no currency with prerecorded serial numbers, no fingerprints on the bags of cocaine. No drugs had been found in the defendants' homes (or in the homes of anyone else arrested that day). Coleman's written reports were sketchy, his memory of the transactions sketchier. Yet all four defendants had been convicted, receiving jury sentences totaling 516 years, for an average of 129 years each.

Coleman claimed he had made a deal on the morning of January 18, 1999, to buy an eightball of cocaine (about 3.5 grams, the weight of a few paper clips) from Wafer, who had arranged for someone else to deliver it later that day. Time cards and testimony from Wafer's boss indicated he was working at the time of the alleged deal, but his boss conceded Wafer sometimes left work during the day to do personal or job-related errands. "Like the other cases," Blakeslee writes, "the contest basically came down to a swearing match between Coleman and the defendant."

Fortunately for Wafer, his lawyer had uncovered information about Coleman that cast serious doubt on his credibility. He had a rocky work history, having abruptly left two law enforcement jobs and skipped town, leaving behind thousands of dollars in debt. His former co-workers described him as an inveterate liar. The local sheriff, who participated in hiring Coleman to work for a federally funded, multi-county, drug task force, had arrested him in the middle of the Tulia operation for stealing gasoline from the government at his previous job--a fact prosecutors had failed to disclose.

Although the judge at Wafer's hearing knew this information from a motion Wafer's lawyer had filed in another case, he had decided not to let the jury in that case hear about the arrest because it had not resulted in a conviction. (The theft charge was dropped after Coleman paid $6,900 in restitution for the debts he owed.) But at the revocation hearing Coleman lied under oath, saying, "I've never been arrested or charged for nothing except a traffic ticket way back when I was a kid. "The judge decided not to revoke Wafer's probation.

Given the "preponderance of the evidence" standard, the judge must have concluded that Coleman probably had lied or somehow made a mistake about buying cocaine from Wafer. (Strictly speaking, the judge could have believed there was a 50 percent chance Coleman was either a liar or a bumbling idiot.) Yet after Wafer's hearing, nearly 30 more people, some in cases overseen by the same judge, were convicted of selling Coleman cocaine based on his say-so or pleaded guilty after seeing the stiff sentences that were coming down. Some defense attorneys didn't know about Coleman's shady past, while others couldn't persuade judges to admit the information in court. It took three more years before public outrage about the weakness of these cases led Gov. Rick Perry to pardon most of the Tulia defendants who were still behind bars.

The frustration of justice delayed permeates Tulia, which is nevertheless a surprisingly fast read for a book of its length. Blakeslee, the journalist who broke the story of Coleman's questionable reliability in The Texas Observer, suggests several reasons for the delay, including lazy defense attorneys, stubborn prosecutors, and hard-assed judges. While national press coverage created an impression of a racist conspiracy to railroad innocent blacks, Blakeslee's richly detailed account shows the truth was both more complicated and simpler. Not all of the defendants were innocent of the charges against them, but all of them were innocent in the sense that they did nothing to deserve the treatment they received. Tulia demands our attention not because the events there were so unusual but because they dramatically illustrate the injustices routinely inflicted by the war on drugs, which results in 1.7 million arrests a year and keeps half a million Americans behind bars for failing to comply with an arbitrary set of pharmacological preferences.