Excerpt
From
Promises Betrayed:
On the morning of July 23, 1999, law enforcement officers fanned out and arrested more than 10 percent of the tiny African-American population of Tulia, Texas, a hot, dusty town of 5,000 about fifty miles south of Amarillo.
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.
Among the forty-six 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.
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 eighteen-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.
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.