Taking the 'Garbage' Out in Tulia: Racial Profiling and the Taboo on Black/White Romance in the 'War on Drugs'

In July 1999, Tulia, Texas hit the national headlines and became the poster child for the discriminatory impacts of the "war on drugs." In a sting operation, a corrupt undercover officer framed a substantial percentage of African Americans in a small Texas Panhandle town. Tried, convicted, and sentenced to decades in prison, the group ultimately was released as a result of the monumental efforts of a group of attorneys, led by a young lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Part I of this essay offers a capsule summary of the Tulia sting. Part II analyzes one of the most fascinating angles of the case, which was largely ignored in the press coverage and kept under wraps by the attorneys who successfully vindicated the Tulia defendants. A careful study of the cases reveals that the defendants arrested in the sting came predominantly from a discrete sub-section of the African American community - those who were in, or had been in, interracial relationships with whites. A unanimous Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia (1967), which struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, forty years ago, which helped inspire this retrospective symposium. However, despite improvements in the nation's racial sensibilities and increasing acceptance of interracial relationships, Black/white intimacy remains off-limits in Tulia, just as it is in much of the United States. Consequently, Blacks who were romantically involved with whites were among the least popular, and most marginalized, of all African Americans in town. As such, they were easier than almost any other population sub-group to convict on trumped-up charges. Ultimately, the Tulia case represents one more example of the falsity of the claim that an increasingly multiracial United States has ended the disfavor of Black/white relationships. This, of course, undermines the claim that we live in a color blind society. Part III contends that the Tulia case, with its extraordinary facts, is not an outlier unlikely of repetition but simply a clear example of the racially disparate impacts of the enforcement of the criminal laws that occur regularly, although generally more subtly, throughout the United States. Racial profiling, a variation of which occurred in the case, in law enforcement is one symptom of the disease that deeply afflicts the entire criminal justice system. In Tulia, law enforcement targeted the defendants because of race, with their race contributing to their convictions and long sentences. Importantly, the round-up directly resulted from the full court press for drug convictions - and the allocation of financial resources based on convictions - that is part and parcel of the nation's long-running "war on drugs." Increasing the likelihood of an incident like that which occurred in Tulia, the Supreme Court over the last several decades has steadily afforded greater discretion to law enforcement. The dangers of the expansion of law enforcement authority are starkly revealed in the Tulia case. A lone drug enforcement officer, with much authority and precious little supervision, combined with incentives for arrests and convictions, placed the machinery in motion for a massive - and legally and factually wrong - shakedown of the African American community. Once the process was set in motion, it proved to be incredibly difficult to stop and to make the corrections necessary to ensure that full justice was done. From a criminal justice perspective, what is most telling, as well as troubling, about the Tulia story is that one corrupt white police officer - the proverbial "bad apple" - was able to start the ball rolling so that so many innocent people were sent to prison based on virtually no evidence. Tulia is uncomfortably reminiscent of the lynching of African Americans based on the - too often false - word of a single white person in the hey-day of Jim Crow. The public as a whole never questioned the guilt of the defendants; not a single jury acquitted any of the 47 Tulia defendants. The gravity of the injustice hints at the deep and enduring institutional problems existing in the criminal justice system. Such problems obviously must be corrected to avoid such travesties of justice in the future. The question is what can be done, as well as how it could be implemented, to reform the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, despite considerable publicity over the Tulia case, there is no reform proposal on the table that comes close to solving the deep systemic problems in the U.S. criminal justice system. Indeed, less attention has focused on the excesses of the drug war since the "war on terror" commenced after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, which, at least for the time being, supplanted the war on drugs and resulted in its own controversial excesses.