I 
117TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION 
H. R. 129 
To increase the evidentiary standard required to convict a person for a 
drug offense, to require screening of law enforcement officers or others 
acting under color of law participating in drug task forces, and for 
other purposes. 
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
JANUARY 4, 2021 
Ms. JACKSON LEE introduced the following bill; which was referred to the 
Committee on the Judiciary 
A BILL 
To increase the evidentiary standard required to convict a 
person for a drug offense, to require screening of law 
enforcement officers or others acting under color of law 
participating in drug task forces, and for other purposes. 
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘No More Tulias: Drug 
Law Enforcement Evidentiary Standards Improvement 
Act of 2021’’. 
SEC. 2. FINDINGS; SENSE OF CONGRESS. 
(a) FINDINGS.—Congress finds the following: 
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(1) In recent years it has become clear that 
programs funded by the Edward Byrne Memorial 
Justice Assistance Grant program (referred to in 
this Act as the ‘‘Byrne grants program’’) have per-
petuated racial disparities, corruption in law enforce-
ment, and the commission of civil rights abuses 
across the country. This is especially the case when 
it comes to the program’s funding of hundreds of re-
gional antidrug task forces because the grants for 
these antidrug task forces have been dispensed to 
State governments with very little Federal oversight 
and have been prone to misuse and corruption. 
(2) Numerous Government Accountability Of-
fice reports have found that the Department of Jus-
tice has inadequately monitored grants provided 
under the Byrne grants program. A 2001 General 
Accounting Office report found that one-third of the 
grants did not contain required monitoring plans. 
Seventy percent of files on such grants did not con-
tain required progress reports. Forty-one percent of 
such files did not contain financial reports covering 
the full grant period. A 2002 report by the Heritage 
Foundation reported that ‘‘there is virtually no evi-
dence’’ that the Byrne grants program has been suc-
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cessful in reducing crime and that the program lacks 
‘‘adequate measures of performance’’. 
(3) A 2002 report by the American Civil Lib-
erties Union of Texas identified 17 recent scandals 
involving antidrug task forces in Texas that receive 
funds under the Byrne grants program. Such scan-
dals include cases of the falsification of government 
records, witness tampering, fabricating evidence, 
false imprisonment, stealing drugs from evidence 
lockers, selling drugs to children, large-scale racial 
profiling, sexual harassment, and other abuses of of-
ficial capacity. Recent scandals in other States in-
clude the misuse of millions of dollars in Byrne 
grants program money in Kentucky and Massachu-
setts, wrongful convictions based on police perjury in 
Missouri, and negotiations with drug offenders to 
drop or lower their charges in exchange for money 
or vehicles in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massa-
chusetts, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin. 
(4) The most well-known Byrne-funded task 
force scandal occurred in Tulia, Texas, where dozens 
of African-American residents (totaling over 16 per-
cent of the town’s African-American population) 
were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to decades 
in prison, based solely on the uncorroborated testi-
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mony of one undercover officer whose background 
included past allegations of misconduct, sexual har-
assment, unpaid debts, and habitual use of a racial 
epithet. The undercover officer was allowed to work 
alone, and not required to provide audiotapes, video 
surveillance, or eyewitnesses to corroborate his alle-
gations. Despite the lack of physical evidence or cor-
roboration, the charges were vigorously prosecuted. 
After the first few trials resulted in convictions and 
lengthy sentences, many defendants accepted plea 
bargains. Suspicions regarding the legitimacy of the 
charges eventually arose after two of the accused de-
fendants were able to produce convincing alibi evi-
dence to prove that they were out of State or at 
work at the time of the alleged drug purchases. 
Texas Governor Rick Perry eventually pardoned the 
Tulia defendants (after four years of imprisonment), 
but these kinds of scandals continue to plague Byrne 
grant program spending. 
(5) A case arose in a Federal court in Waco, 
Texas, concerning the wrongful arrests of 28 African 
Americans out of 4,500 other residents of Hearne, 
Texas. In November 2000, these individuals were ar-
rested on charges of possession or distribution of 
crack cocaine, and they subsequently filed a case 
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against the county government. On May 11, 2005, 
a magistrate judge found sufficient evidence that a 
Byrne-funded antidrug task force had routinely tar-
geted African Americans to hold the county liable 
for the harm suffered by the plaintiffs. Plaintiffs in 
that lawsuit alleged that for the past 15 years, based 
on the uncorroborated tales of informants, task force 
members annually raided the African-American com-
munity in eastern Hearne to arrest the residents 
identified by the confidential informants, resulting in 
the arrest and prosecution of innocent citizens with-
out cause. On the eve of trial the counties involved 
in the Hearne task force scandal settled the case, 
agreeing to pay financial damages to the plaintiffs. 
(6) Scandals related to the Byrne grants pro-
gram have grown so prolific that the Texas legisla-
ture has passed several reforms in response to them, 
including outlawing racial profiling and changing 
Texas law to prohibit drug offense convictions based 
solely on the word of an undercover informant. The 
Criminal Jurisprudence Committee of the Texas 
House of Representatives issued a report in 2004 
recommending that all of the State’s federally fund-
ed antidrug task forces be abolished because they 
are inherently prone to corruption. The Committee 
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reported, ‘‘Continuing to sanction task force oper-
ations as stand-alone law enforcement entities—with 
widespread authority to operate at will across mul-
tiple jurisdictional lines—should not continue. The 
current approach violates practically every sound 
principle of police oversight and accountability appli-
cable to narcotics interdiction.’’ The Texas legisla-
ture passed a law that ends the ability of a narcotics 
task force to operate as an entity with no clear ac-
countability. The legislation transfers authority for 
multicounty drug task forces to the Department of 
Public Safety and channels one-quarter of asset for-
feiture proceeds received by the task forces to a spe-
cial fund to support drug abuse prevention pro-
grams, drug treatment, and other programs de-
signed to reduce drug use in the county where the 
assets are seized. 
(7) Texas’s ‘‘corroboration’’ law was passed 
thanks to a coalition of Christian conservatives and 
civil rights activists. As one Texas preacher related, 
requiring corroboration ‘‘puts a protective hedge 
around the ninth commandment, ‘You shall not bear 
false witness against your neighbor.’ As long as peo-
ple bear false witness against their neighbors, this 
Biblical law will not be outdated.’’ 
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(8) During floor debate, conservative Texas leg-
islators pointed out that Mosaic law requires cor-
roboration: ‘‘One witness shall not rise up against a 
man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that 
he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the 
mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be estab-
lished.’’ Deuteronomy 19:15. Jesus concurred with 
the corroboration rule: ‘‘If thy brother shall trespass 
against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee 
and him alone. . . . But if he will not hear thee, 
then take with thee one or two more, that in the 
mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be 
established.’’ Matthew 18:15–16. 
(9) Texas’s ‘‘corroboration’’ law had an imme-
diate positive impact. Once prosecutors needed more 
than just the word of one person to convict someone 
of a drug offense they began scrutinizing law en-
forcement tactics. This new scrutiny led to the un-
covering of massive corruption and civil rights abuse 
by the Dallas police force. In what became known 
nationally as the ‘‘Sheetrock’’ scandal, Dallas police 
officers and undercover informants were found to 
have set up dozens of innocent people, mostly Mexi-
can immigrants, by planting fake drugs on them 
consisting of chalk-like material used in sheetrock 
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and other brands of wallboard. The revelations led 
to the dismissal of over 40 cases (although some of 
those arrested were already deported). In April 
2005, a former Dallas narcotics detective was sen-
tenced to five years in prison for his role in the 
scheme. Charges against others are pending. 
(10) Many regional antidrug task forces receive 
up to 75 percent of their funding from the Byrne 
grant program. As such, the United States Govern-
ment is accountable for corruption and civil rights 
abuses inherent in their operation. 
(b) SENSE OF CONGRESS.—It is the sense of Con-
gress that— 
(1) grants under the Byrne grants program 
should be prohibited for States that do not exercise 
effective control over antidrug task forces; 
(2) at a minimum, no State that fails to pro-
hibit criminal convictions based solely on the testi-
mony of a law enforcement officer or informants 
should receive a grant under such program; and 
(3) corroborative evidence, such as video or 
audio tapes, drugs, and money, should always be re-
quired for such criminal convictions to be sustained. 
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SEC. 3. LIMITATION ON RECEIPT OF BYRNE GRANT FUNDS 
AND OTHER DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE LAW 
ENFORCEMENT ASSISTANCE. 
(a) LIMITATION.—For any fiscal year, a State shall 
not receive any amount that would otherwise be allocated 
to that State under section 505(a) of the Omnibus Crime 
Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (34 U.S.C. 
10156(a)), or any amount from any other law enforcement 
assistance program of the Department of Justice, unless 
the State— 
(1) does not fund any antidrug task forces for 
that fiscal year; or 
(2) has in effect throughout the State laws that 
ensure— 
(A) a person is not convicted of a drug of-
fense unless the fact that a drug offense was 
committed, and the fact that the person com-
mitted that offense, are each supported by evi-
dence other than the eyewitness testimony of a 
law enforcement officer or an individual acting 
on behalf of a law enforcement officer; and 
(B) a law enforcement officer does not par-
ticipate in an antidrug task force unless the 
honesty and integrity of that officer is evalu-
ated and found to be at an appropriately high 
level. 
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(b) REGULATIONS.—The Attorney General shall pre-
scribe regulations to carry out subsection (a). 
(c) REALLOCATION.—Amounts not allocated by rea-
son of subsection (a) shall be reallocated to States not dis-
qualified by failure to comply with such subsection. 
SEC. 4. COLLECTION OF DATA. 
(a) IN GENERAL.—A State that receives Federal 
funds pursuant to eligibility under section 3(a)(2), with 
respect to a fiscal year, shall collect data, for the most 
recent year for which funds were allocated to such State, 
with respect to the— 
(1) racial distribution of charges made during 
that year; 
(2) nature of the criminal law specified in the 
charges made; and 
(3) city or law enforcement jurisdiction in 
which the charges were made. 
(b) REPORT.—As a condition of receiving Federal 
funds pursuant to section 3(a)(2), a State shall submit 
to Congress the data collected under subsection (a) by not 
later than the date that is 180 days prior to the date on 
which such funds are awarded for a fiscal year. 
Æ 
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