|
Racism
at the Canada/U.S. border | 2005: From
Saskatoon to LA, people are resisting police abuse
Tulia (1) 2006
update (not a good outcome!)
update on Tulia: Judge
recommends all 38 convictions be thrown out
|
Tulia, Texas: a blueprint
for our future?
Fifteen years ago, there were
not very many young people incarcerated in Saskatchewan. There
were places which looked after those who got in conflict with
the law. What is seen in this topsy turvy world as progress has
arrived and now we have locked up a significant portion of our
aboriginal and poor white 
youth. We have seen horrific
abuses such as the Scandal
of the Century where Saskatoon corporal Dueck took advantage
of the fact that no one was looking over his shoulder to get
three disadvantaged children to make up stories about adults
to put those adults in jail . . . Dueck perhaps got the idea
from the McMartin
case in California, or perhaps the Little
Rascals case in North Carolina, or Kelly
Michaels in New Jersey-- which already had been shown to
be fraudulant -- but none of the perpetrating authorities suffered
any consequences. Dueck also set up his share of dirty drug stings,
notably Flotilla, but framing sex
charges was where his talents shone. In no time at all he moved
from corporal to sergeant to acting superintendent to CID superintendent,
the position he now holds.
Dueck is getting set to retire on his hefty
Superintendent pension but there are others he has trained coming
up the ranks: the city and the province seem unwilling to stop
them. As more children are driven into poverty, here is a glimpse
of one possible future, one abusive cop's greedy accomplishments
in Texas this century . . .
|
First story
on this page: A
Confused Inquiry | also
on this page : Justice
a stranger in Tulia, Texas, New York Times | Tulia's
Shattered Lives
| Tulia
And Beyond: Taking Drug Task Forces To Task | How
the Lingering Effects of a Massive Drug Bust Devastated One Family
in a Small Texas Town Tulia Blues (the Village Voice investigative story
which broke this out of Texas in August, 2001)|
(Thanks
to Phil C. for bringing this story to our attention)
A Confused Inquiry
August 22,
2002, By BOB
HERBERT
Under pressure,
and after a great deal of confusion among its own officials,
the U.S. Justice Department has said it will continue its criminal
investigation into a drug sting gone haywire in the Texas panhandle
town of Tulia.
Just last month
an adviser to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Lori Sharpe Day,
wrote in a letter to the president of the American Bar Association:
"An investigation of events in Tulia was conducted by the
Criminal Section and recently closed."
Those "events"
included the arrests on July 23, 1999, of dozens of Tulia residents
on narcotics trafficking charges. Local authorities rounded up
more than 10 percent of the town's black population.
The arrests
were the culmination of an absurd one-man "investigation"
by Tom Coleman, a narcotics agent who did not wear a wire or
conduct any video surveillance, did not keep detailed records
of his alleged drug buys and wrote such important information
as the names of suspects and the dates of transactions on his
legs and other parts of his body.
After a series
of columns in this space, an outcry arose and several public
officials asked the Justice Department to take action.
Senator Charles
Schumer of New York, in a letter to Mr. Ashcroft, said: "This
is far worse than Keystone Kops police work. It looks more like
deliberate racial profiling, arresting and prosecuting with trumped-up
evidence. Officer Coleman's `investigation' is more reminiscent
of the Old South of 1962 than the New South of 2002."
Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton noted in a letter to Mr. Ashcroft that Mr. Coleman
had made criminal allegations against people who were subsequently
shown to be innocent. But most of the time his word was enough
to send people to prison, sometimes for astonishingly long sentences.
The "evidence"
in those cases, said Mrs. Clinton, "was simply the testimony
of Mr. Coleman. Yet any reasonable review of the public information
made available clearly establishes that Mr. Coleman's testimony
in many cases was at best inconclusive, and at worst constituted
perjury."
In a direct
plea to Mr. Ashcroft, Mrs. Clinton said, "I implore you
to reopen the criminal investigation of Mr. Coleman as soon as
possible."
As requests
for some sort of action continued to come in, Justice Department
officials seemed baffled about the status of their alleged investigation
into the events in Tulia.
A criminal
investigation of Tom Coleman's activities was started two years
ago, when Bill Clinton was president. I called the Justice Department
two weeks ago to ask about the status of that investigation.
A spokesman, Mark Corallo, said that it was continuing. I told
him I had a copy of the letter from Ms. Day to Robert Hirshorn,
president of the Bar Association, saying the investigation had
been closed.
Mr. Corallo
seemed surprised. He said Ms. Day had probably been mistaken,
but that he would check. He called back and said, "Mystery
solved!"
According to
Mr. Corallo, the criminal investigation had, in fact, been closed,
but the matter was still under "review" by the Civil
Rights Division.
This week the
official account changed yet again. In a letter to the editor
of The New York Times, the Justice Department's director of public
affairs, Barbara Comstock, said the information given to the
Bar Association was erroneous, and the criminal investigation
"remains open."
"The department
apologizes," said Ms. Comstock, "for any confusion
resulting from the issuance of that letter."
She said, "The
Criminal Section is working expeditiously to review all of the
relevant evidence to determine whether to prosecute for federal
criminal civil rights laws violations."
If the department
is serious about this matter - and that remains to be seen -
it will not limit its investigation to Mr. Coleman's activities.
There was an entire criminal justice hierarchy that worked in
concert to send the Tulia defendants to prison, including the
district attorney who prosecuted the cases, the sheriff who hired
Mr. Coleman, and the regional narcotics task force that trained
and supervised him.
Federal investigators
who are both honest and diligent will find plenty of evidence
of official wrongdoing waiting for them in Tulia.
Justice
a stranger in Tulia, Texas
BOB HERBERT, SYNDICATED
COLUMNIST, July 30, 2002
Tulia is a hot, dusty town
of 5,000 on the Texas Panhandle, about 50 miles south of Amarillo.
For some, it's a frightening
place, slow and bigoted and bizarre. Kafka could have had a field
day with Tulia.
On the morning of July 23,
1999, law enforcement officers fanned out and arrested more than
10 percent of Tulia's tiny African American population. Also
arrested were a handful of whites who had relationships with
blacks.
The humiliating roundup was
intensely covered by the local media, which had been tipped off
in advance. Men and women, bewildered and unkempt, were paraded
before TV cameras and featured prominently on the evening news.
They were drug traffickers, one and all, said the sheriff, a
not particularly bright Tulia bulb named Larry Stewart.
Among the 46 so-called traffickers
were a pig farmer, a forklift operator and a number of ordinary
young women with children.
If these were major cocaine
dealers, as alleged, they were among the oddest in the United
States. None of them had any money to speak of. And when they
were arrested, they didn't have any cocaine. No drugs, money
or weapons were recovered during the surprise roundup.
Most of Tulia's white residents
applauded the arrests, and the local newspapers were all but
giddy with their editorial approval. The first convictions came
quickly, and the sentences left the town's black residents aghast.
One of the few white defendants, a man who happened to have a
mixed-race child, was sentenced to more than 300 years in prison.
The hog farmer, a black man in his late 50s named Joe Moore,
was sentenced to 90 years. Kareem White, a 24-year-old black
man, was sentenced to 60 years. And so on.
When the defendants awaiting
trial saw this extreme sentencing trend, they began scrambling
to plead guilty in exchange for lighter sentences. These ranged
from 18 years in prison to, in some case, just probation.
It is not an overstatement
to describe the arrests in Tulia as an atrocity. The entire operation
was the work of a single police officer who claimed to have conducted
an 18-month undercover operation. The arrests were made solely
on the word of this officer, Tom Coleman, a white man with a
wretched work history, who routinely referred to black people
as "niggers" and who frequently found himself in trouble
with the law.
Coleman's alleged undercover
operation was ridiculous. There were no other police officers
to corroborate his activities. He did not wear a wire or conduct
any video surveillance. And he did not keep detailed records
of his alleged drug buys. He said he sometimes wrote such important
information as the names of suspects and the dates of transactions
on his leg.
In trial after trial, prosecutors
put Coleman on the witness stand and his uncorroborated, unsubstantiated
testimony was enough to send people to prison for decades.
In some instances, lawyers
have been able to show that there was no basis in fact -- none
at all -- for Coleman's allegations, that they came from some
realm other than reality.
He said, for example, that
he had purchased drugs from a woman named Tonya White, and she
was duly charged. But last April the charges had to be dropped
when White's lawyers proved that she had cashed a check in Oklahoma
City at the time that she was supposed to have been selling drugs
to Coleman in Tulia.
Another defendant, Billy Don
Wafer, was able to prove -- through employee time sheets and
his boss' testimony -- that he was working at the time he was
alleged by Coleman to have been selling cocaine. And the local
district attorney, Terry McEachern, had to dismiss the case against
a man named Yul Bryant after it was learned that Coleman had
described him as a tall black man with bushy hair. Bryant was
5-foot-6 and bald.
In a just world, this case
would be no more than a spoof on "Saturday Night Live."
Instead it's a tragedy with no remedy in sight.
The NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial
Justice, the Tulia Legal Defense Project and a number of private
law firms are trying to mount an effort to free the men and women
imprisoned in this fiasco.
The idea that people could
be rounded up and sent away for what are effectively lifetime
terms solely on the word of a police officer like Tom Coleman
is insane.
Bob Herbert is a columnist
with The New York Times. Copyright 2002 New York Times News Service.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
Tulia's Shattered Lives
By BOB HERBERT, NYT
TULIA, Tex. -- "There,"
said Mattie White, squinting against the hot sun. "That's
where the kingpin lived."
Her voice was thick with disgust
and bitter irony as she uttered the word "kingpin."
She pointed to the absolute ruin of a house that had belonged
to Joe Moore, a pig farmer in his late 50's who was said by law
enforcement authorities to be the lead trafficker of the dozens
of alleged cocaine dealers rounded up in an infamous series of
raids on July 23, 1999.
The house - little more than
a shack, really - seemed about to collapse from the weight of
its crumbling concrete and rotting wood. Windows were broken,
screens were shredded, and the corrugated tin roof was a study
in rust and corrosion.
Mr. Moore was no major gangster.
But he was swept up in the raids that followed an 18-month "deep
undercover" investigation by a narcotics agent named Tom
Coleman. There was no evidence that anyone arrested was a substantial
dealer of cocaine, as alleged. No drugs, money or weapons were
found in the raids. And the evidence against the suspects consisted
almost solely of Mr. Coleman's uncorroborated, unsubstantiated
word.
But in Tulia, a hot, dusty
and racist town on the Texas panhandle, that was enough. Mr.
Coleman, who is white, targeted poor black residents and a handful
of whites who had relationships with them. Some of the targets
had had previous run-ins with the law, and one of those was Joe
Moore. Although he insisted he had sold no drugs, he was convicted
on the word of Mr. Coleman, and the court was merciless. He was
sentenced to 90 years in state prison.
"Joe Moore didn't sell
no drugs," said Mrs. White. "All he did was sell his
hogs. Me and him was real good friends. He was a nice person,
and he would help anyone."
Mr. Coleman's investigative
shenanigans (he worked alone, kept no detailed records and fingered
obviously innocent people) have devastated the tiny black community
here. And they have taken an extreme toll on Mrs. White, a serious,
hard-working and very religious black woman of 51. Her 33-year-old
daughter Tonya was accused of selling drugs to Mr. Coleman. Not
only was Tonya not in Tulia when she was supposed to have been
selling the drugs, she didn't even live in Texas.
The charges against Tonya White
had to be dropped when lawyers produced bank records that proved
she was in Oklahoma City at the time that Mr. Coleman said the
drug transaction had occurred.
Mrs. White's son Donald, 32,
was not as fortunate. He, too, was accused of selling to Mr.
Coleman. And Donald was known to have struggled with a drug habit
in the past. He was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Because of good behavior, and perhaps because there was mitigating
evidence offered at trial, Donald was paroled after serving two
years.
Mrs. White's daughter Kizzie,
25, was also accused of selling drugs to Tom Coleman. She was
convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Mrs. White's son Kareem, 26,
was also accused of selling drugs to Tom Coleman. He was convicted
and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
This goes on and on. Kizzie
White has two children, an 8-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy.
The father of the boy is a white man named Cash Love. He, too,
was accused of selling drugs to Tom Coleman. Mr. Love was awarded
a special measure of Tulia's venom. He was convicted and sentenced
to more than 300 years in prison.
It may be that some people
sold some small amounts of drugs to Mr. Coleman, a troubled man
who has had his own difficulties with the law. But there is no
evidence that anyone caught in his net was a major dealer. And
there is plenty of evidence that innocent people were snared
and sent off to prison.
Mrs. White is now working two
jobs as she tries to care for Kizzie's children, maintain her
own home and offer hope and support for Kizzie and Kareem, who
are in prisons far from Tulia.
"It's very difficult,"
she said. "These children miss their mama, and I've fallen
behind on my mortgage and taxes. It's terrible what that man
has done with his lies. He has ruined so many lives. I just pray
and ask God to help me, because I know he knows the difference
between right and wrong."
Tulia And Beyond: Taking
Drug Task Forces To Task
April 15, 2002, Arianna
online
Ever heard of Tulia? It's a
little town in Texas that was the scene of one of the most shameful
miscarriages of justice in modern American history -- a highly
questionable undercover drug sting that in the summer of 1999
led to the arrest of one out of every six of the town's African-Americans.
But the dismissal of charges
last week against Tonya White, one of the final two Tulia defendants,
has finally kicked open the door on the dubious nature of the
entire Tulia operation and exposed one of the many shadowy corners
of the drug war: the power and abuses of drug task forces.
White, whose sister and two
brothers were sentenced to a combined 97 years in jail after
being caught up in the Tulia drug sweep, avoided a similar fate
only after her lawyers uncovered a bank deposit slip that proved
she was in Oklahoma City, 300 miles away from Tulia, at the time
she was alleged to have sold cocaine to Tom Coleman, the controversial
undercover cop whose uncorroborated testimony was the sole basis
for the Tulia round-up.
Since the bust, Coleman's credibility
has come under withering fire. Branded a "compulsive liar"
by former coworkers and unfit for law enforcement work by a sheriff
he once served under, Coleman was even arrested for theft in
the middle of the Tulia operation, but, amazingly, was still
allowed to continue his undercover work. And the prosecution
continued to trust him and rely on his word even after it was
proven that he had perjured himself on the stand.
But this story is about more
than one small town and one bad cop, it's about drug task forces
allowed to run wild.
During the Tulia sting, Tom
Coleman was working under the auspices of the Panhandle Regional
Narcotics Task Force in Amarillo, Texas, one of an estimated
1,000 drug task forces operating nationwide. These autonomous
special units, which came into widespread use in the 1980s as
a way of combating America's growing drug problem, have morphed
into the rampaging mad dogs of the drug war, operating with very
little oversight or accountability. And when aggressive law enforcement
agencies operate without accountability, what happens is exactly
what you would expect to happen.
Reports of their questionable
tactics -- particularly the use of unreliable informants and
a disturbing focus on poor, black drug users rather than big-time
dealers -- are widespread.
And it's taxpayer money that
is paying for this wave of abuse, through a federal grant program
that has distributed billions of dollars to drug task forces
since its inception.
Making matters even worse is
that this grant money is tied to the number of busts a task force
makes -- the more arrests made, the more money received. The
result is a law enforcement mindset that elevates raw numbers
over justice, strip mining anyone remotely resembling a plausible
defendant from the ranks of those least able to defend themselves
against such a well-heeled machine.
"These task forces,"
says Will Harrell, executive director of the Texas ACLU, "have
one motive and one motive only: to produce numbers lest they
lose their funding for the next year. But no one questions how
they go about their business." Of course, if task force
dragnets were cast more evenly, ruining the lives not just of
the poor but of bankers and brokers with a nasty little coke
habit or suburban boomer couples that haven't shaken their taste
for getting high now and then, you can bet there would be some
questioning.
But they're not. And this emphasis
on statistics is why the vast majority of task force arrests
are street-level dealers -- it's the easiest kind of bust to
make. Why try and infiltrate the secretive and well-guarded world
of major drug purveyors when you can just stroll up to a street
corner, buy a rock or a little pot, and watch your task force
ranking rise -- along with your annual budget.
On TV cop shows, the first
thing a detective does when he busts a street dealer is try to
cut a deal with the perp in an effort to land a bigger fish.
But that's not the way it works in the real world. In Tulia,
for example, not a single defendant was offered a reduced sentence
in exchange for turning in his or her supplier.
Combined with draconian asset
forfeiture laws, the money-for-arrest model has turned avaricious
cops into drug war entrepreneurs, all-too-willing to bend the
rules in exchange for more money and power. In a grave abuse
of our treasured presumption of innocence, forfeiture laws allow
police departments to seize and sell any property connected to
illegal drugs, even if the owner is never actually charged with
a crime.
Task force cops have even started
talking like businessmen. Witness this Wall Street-flavored assessment
from one Texas task force's quarterly report: "Highway seizures
were off a bit this quarter, but crack sales are still strong."
Sounds like they would like nothing better than for all of us
to jump on the crack bandwagon and buy, buy, buy!
The more you look into drug
task forces, the more you realize that the shoddy police work
exhibited in Tulia -- shady narc, iffy suspect IDs, a lack of
corroborating evidence - is the norm rather than an aberration.
"Everybody's talking about Tom Coleman," says Barbara
Markham, a former task force agent turned whistle blower. "Well,
there are whole task forces of Tom Colemans out there."
A very scary thought given an undercover cop's ability to send
someone to jail for life solely on his word.
In Tulia, Coleman's word led
to the conviction of 42 people, 16 of whom are still in jail
serving sentences of up to 435 years. But despite the mountain
of doubt raised about Coleman, the Tulia prosecutor, Terry McEachern,
continues to stand by his narc -- dismissing Coleman's lies about
Tonya White as a mistake.
In reality, it's not a mistake
-- it's a smoking gun. One that Jeff Blackburn, who represented
Tonya White, hopes will ultimately lead to the overturning of
the other Tulia convictions. To that end, he has created the
Tulia Legal Defense Project and is about to mount a campaign
to get Texas Gov. Rick Perry to pardon the victims of the Tulia
sting.
And he's doing all this on
his own dime, having invested over $25,000 in the effort. "If
you're going to blow 25 grand," Blackburn told me, "what
better way to spend it than helping free innocent people?"
Blackburn's efforts have drawn
support from a number of national organizations, including the
NAACP, the American Bar Association, and the William Moses Kunstler
Fund for Racial Justice.
It's time for Gov. Perry to
join them and pardon the Tulia defendants, and for the rest of
us to take a much harder look at the abuses being perpetrated
in the name of the war on drugs.
How the Lingering Effects
of a Massive Drug Bust Devastated One Family in a Small Texas
Town Tulia Blues
by Jennifer Gonnerman, Week
of August 1 - 7, 2001, Village Voice
TULIA, TEXAS-Only a few years
ago, Mattie White liked to sit on the front porch of her one-story
house. In the park across the street, young people played basketball
and hung out on the swings, their shouts echoing through the
neighborhood. These days, though, Conner Park is quiet. Many
of the people who once gathered there are now in prison.
In Tulia, a dry town without
a bar or nightclub, Conner Park was a favorite hangout for the
town's black youth. Today, it has become a symbol of the community's
devastation. For Mattie and many others, the park is a lonely
sight, a constant reminder of all the friends, neighbors, and
relatives who are gone.
Early on the morning of July
23, 1999, cops burst into homes all over this tiny town in the
Texas panhandle. Forty-six people-a few whites and almost half
the town's black adult population-were indicted for drug trafficking.
Dozens of children became virtual orphans as their parents were
hauled to jail. In the coming months, 19 people would be shipped
to state prison, some with sentences of 20, 60, or even 99 years.
The last trial ended in the
fall of 2000, but this chapter in Tulia history has certainly
not closed. Ever since the arrests, prisoners' relatives and
friends have been struggling with the aftermath: destroyed families,
traumatized children, townspeople's cold stares. The ripple effects
of a large drug bust may be the same everywhere, but they are
especially apparent in a small town, where there is none of the
frenzy of urban life to hide the damage.
Mattie, a 50-year-old mother
of six, was never accused of selling drugs, but she too has been
punished. The undercover drug operation snared her two sons,
one daughter, one brother-in-law, two nephews, one son-in-law,
one niece, and two cousins. Now Mattie struggles to raise her
daughter's two children and juggle two jobs, including one as
a prison guard. (Her ex-husband took in a few other grandchildren.)
About the undercover drug operation, Mattie says, "It has
made my life miserable. My whole world seems like it fell down
on me."
Drive 45 minutes south of Amarillo,
Texas, and you'll arrive in Tulia (pop. 5117), where a billboard
welcomes visitors to the town with "the Richest Land and
the Finest People." Perhaps a more accurate description
these days would be "the Driest Land and the Most Divided
People."
Tulia has the feel of a ghost
town. Most of the parking spaces downtown are empty and nearly
all the fields are brown. Like many rural farming towns, Tulia
has been ailing for years. Farmers who received federal subsidies
survived, but the poorer residents, including most of the black
population, were hard hit. Farmhand jobs disappeared. Two of
the main employers for blacks are a meatpacking plant and a Wal-Mart
distribution center, both located in a small city 22 miles away.
Working there requires a car, which many people here do not own.
In some ways, the civil rights
era seems to have never quite reached Tulia. Poor blacks here
live in trailers and subsidized houses in
"Sunset Addition,"
a neighborhood on the west side that some people still call "Niggertown."
Once an almost all-white town, Tulia is now 51 percent white,
40 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent black.
Cocaine has been readily available
here for years, as it has been across the rural South. But over
the last year, Tulia has emerged as a hotbed of drug-war politics.
Activists point to the situation in Tulia as a perfect example
of all that is wrong with the war on drugs-from dubious police
tactics to ultra-stiff prison sentences to shattered families.
How could such a small, impoverished
town possibly support 46 drug dealers? The answer appears to
have nothing to do with uncovering a well-organized drug ring
and everything to do with a narcotics agent named Tom Coleman.
The undercover agent spent 18 months infiltrating the black community
here, and the entire drug bust was built on his undercover work.
There were no wiretaps, no surveillance photos, and virtually
no secondary witnesses. The morning that cops barged into the
suspects' homes, they found no weapons, money, or drugs.
Questions about Coleman's credibility
have been buzzing along Tulia's grapevine ever since. The black
community here insists that Coleman targeted its members, setting
up small-time users and fabricating evidence against others.
Some defendants charged with selling Coleman drugs said they
did not know him. In one case, the agent said he was not certain
whether a defendant actually sold him cocaine. The charges against
that man were dropped.
While he was working undercover
in Tulia, Coleman himself was arrested. The sheriff at a police
department where he'd previously worked filed charges of theft
and issued an arrest warrant in 1998, after Coleman disappeared
mid shift and never returned, leaving behind a pile of debts
and a police car parked next to his house. Coleman paid back
the money after he was arrested. He did not spend a night in
jail. (The NAACP is planning to try to get Coleman indicted for
perjury based on a statement he made about his past during a
court hearing.)
None of these incidents curbed
the Swisher County district attorney's enthusiasm for prosecuting
Coleman's cases. Over the next year, Mattie and many others spent
hours pacing the corridor of the town courthouse. Mattie's three
children decided to go to trial; not one of their jurors was
black. Mattie knew many of the jurors, including a few who had
played with her on a town softball team. In the end, all three
juries voted to convict her children. Of the eight defendants
who did not plead guilty and instead went to trial, everyone
was found guilty.
Shortly after the arrests,
The Tulia Sentinel ran a story on its front page with the headline
"Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage." A reader skimming
the newspaper might have thought the article had something to
do with local sanitation efforts. In fact, the first paragraph
stated that the arrests of the town's "known" drug
dealers "had cleared away some of the garbage off Tulia's
streets."
The first of Mattie's children
to go on trial was 30-year-old Donnie Smith, a former Tulia High
football star who briefly attended a local college. Afterward,
for several years, he battled a crack habit and eventually went
to rehab. By the time of his arrest, he had been clean for six
months. During his trial in March 2000, Donnie admitted to smoking
crack, but said he was not a dealer. The jury disagreed, convicting
him of delivering three-fifths of a gram of crack. He received
a two-year sentence.
Donnie still faced charges
of delivering cocaine on six other occasions. He insisted he
was innocent-these charges involved powder cocaine, which Donnie
said he did not use-but he decided to accept a plea bargain to
avoid the sort of lengthy sentences other defendants received.
In return, Donnie got 12 years.
Donnie's 24-year-old sister
Kizzie might have expected to receive a mild punishment, since
she had no felony record. During a two-day trial in April 2000,
Coleman testified that he had bought cocaine from Kizzie seven
times. The jury gave her a 25-year prison sentence. Five months
later, another jury convicted her brother Kareem Abdul Jabbar
White, whom everyone calls "Creamy," of delivering
one eight-ball of cocaine (about $200 worth). Because he had
a prior felony, 25-year-old Creamy got 60 years.
To Mattie, it seemed the motives
of the sheriff, the prosecutor, and the undercover agent had
less to do with shrinking the town's drug supply than with shrinking
the size of Tulia's black population. "They don't want no
black people in this town," she says. "I don't care
what nobody says. If I put a [for sale] sign in my yard tomorrow
and . . . all the rest of these black families [did], they would
be the happiest people in the world. They're seeing colors. They're
not seeing that we're human just like they are."
District Attorney Terry D.
McEachern, who stands behind Coleman's investigation, denies
racism motivated the arrests. "Nobody was targeted that
I was aware of," he says. The prosecutor contends that once
Coleman, who is white, befriended a few members of Tulia's black
community, he could not penetrate the town's other ethnic groups.
"Some of my best friends are blacks," McEachern says.
"I feel sadness for the families of everybody that has to
go to the penitentiary because it puts them through pain, but
the person who goes to the penitentiary made a choice to commit
a crime, and so they must pay for their choice."
On a recent afternoon, Mattie
did what she has been doing for weeks. She lay on the flowered
sofa in her dark living room, propped her sock-covered feet on
a pillow, and watched The Young and the Restless. Seven weeks
ago, a surgeon operated on both feet to remove bone spurs and
bunions. Her doctor told her she would heal by now. But every
time she hobbles to the front door to check on her grandchildren
outside, the pain returns.
The morning that Mattie's three
children were arrested, she was in class, learning how to be
a prison guard. Since she was a teenager, she has always worked
two or three jobs at a time-picking cotton in the fields, pressing
pants at a Levi's factory, selling insurance policies, fixing
radios, styling hair. Once she became a prison guard, Mattie
hoped to get by on just one paycheck.
Mattie has been supervising
prisoners for two years, and she has few complaints. "I
love my job," she says. "I wouldn't trade it for nothing."
The average per-capita income in Tulia is $9113; Mattie earns
more than twice that amount. About her children, Mattie says,
"They were proud of me being a guard. If they hadn't got
in trouble, I imagine all of them probably would've gone to school
to be a guard."
The promise of paying her bills
with one employer vanished after Kizzie's children moved in.
Supporting seven-year-old Roneisha and four-year-old Cashawn
meant that Mattie had to get a part-time job too, this time as
a home health aide. Now her workday begins at 8 a.m. and ends
after 10 p.m. Still, Mattie is deep in debt. Behind on her mortgage
payments, she worries she may lose her four-bedroom home.
When someone goes to prison,
the family left behind often suffers financially, charged with
a slew of unofficial taxes. Mattie's phone bills soared to $500
a month with all the collect calls she was receiving from prison.
Whenever she can, she tries to send her children money to get
shorts (the prison only provides long pants), buy food from the
commissary, go to the doctor (each visit costs $3), and purchase
shoes when theirs wear out. Better than most prisoners' mothers,
Mattie knows what inmates need to get by. "Ten or 20 dollars
a month is really not enough," she says.
Each of Mattie's three children
is in a different prison, so seeing them requires gas money and
plenty of stamina. Kizzie is the farthest away, at a prison in
Gatesville. Visiting her means driving eight hours for a four-hour
visit, then turning around and driving another eight hours home.
She cannot afford a motel, or she would spend the night and visit
Kizzie for two days in a row. Donnie and Creamy are closer. If
Mattie leaves around 3 a.m., she can squeeze in visits with both
sons in one day.
Sometimes Mattie takes her
grandchildren along on these car trips, but the ride home is
never fun. "I try to hold myself up for them," she
says. "I try not to cry because it makes them cry."
Mattie has noticed a change
in the children since their parents went to prison. Cashawn,
especially, has not coped well. He cries in school and is sometimes
mean to other children. "He's not a bad little boy,"
Mattie says. "He likes to play. But when they make him mad,
he'll kick one of them. You can't tell him nothing."
She rarely talks to the children
about their mother because the subject makes everyone too sad.
Instead, she just says, "I'll be glad when your mama comes
home."
Mattie is hardly the only grandparent
in Tulia buckling under the burden of raising young children.
Her ex-husband, Rickey, a 50-year-old machinist, lives nearby
in a three-bedroom trailer. Rickey's girlfriend was locked up
in the same drug bust. Now he and a daughter-in-law are raising
six grandchildren.
Mattie tries to stay strong
by reading the Bible and going to church. Across the computer
monitor in her dining room, a screen saver flashes, announcing
"Jesus Will Fix It, He Is Always on Time." "I
don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't do none of that stuff,"
Mattie says. "I work, I go home, and I go to church. Jesus
is the only drug I take."
Over the last two years, a
small group has started in Tulia on behalf of the people who
were arrested. Mattie joined the organization, Friends of Justice,
which is run by a white minister's family. On the night of July
22, Mattie, Rickey, their grandchildren, and 200 other people
gathered at Conner Park across from Mattie's house for a rally
put together by the organization. The event coincided with the
second anniversary of the drug bust.
Preachers, farmers, and lawyers
joined prisoners' families to eat hamburgers and listen to speakers.
Two busloads of activists arrived from Austin. Five mothers of
drug prisoners flew in from New York City. Parked along the edge
of the park, a police officer in a patrol car monitored the action,
a video camera mounted on his rearview mirror.
The six-hour event featured
several rounds of "This Land Is Your Land," led by
a minister strumming a guitar. Many people wore T-shirts listing
the names of all the defendants. A yellow banner hanging behind
the makeshift wooden stage proclaimed "Never Again. Not
in Tulia. Not Anywhere." The event ended with a midnight
march to the courthouse.
The rally temporarily boosted
Mattie's spirits, but now she is back where she was in the days
leading up the event, her feet resting atop pillows, wondering
when she will be able to return to work. "Sometimes I be
so tired that I just be wanting to give up," Mattie says.
"But I say, 'No, I just got to go on a little bit farther.
I'll be OK.' "
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
