I 
109TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION H. R. 2620 
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 
MAY 25, 2005 
Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas (for herself, Mr. CONYERS, Mr. RANGEL, Mr. 
TOWNS, Mr. PAYNE, Mr. WYNN, Mr. CLEAVER, Mr. RUSH, Mr. LEWIS 
of Georgia, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Ms. WOOLSEY, Mr. FATTAH, Mr. JEF-
FERSON, Ms. WATSON, Mr. JACKSON of Illinois, and Mr. OWENS) intro-
duced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Ju-
diciary 
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 2005’’.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS. 
Congress finds the following: 
(1) In recent years it has become clear that 
programs funded by the Edward Byrne Memorial 
Justice Assistance Grant program (Byrne Grants) 
have perpetuated racial disparities, corruption in law 
enforcement, 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 regional antidrug task forces. 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 United States Jus-
tice Department has inadequately monitored Byrne 
discretionary grants. A 2001 General Accounting 
Office report found that a third of the grants did 
not contain required monitoring plans. 70 percent of 
grant files did not contain required progress reports. 
41 percent 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 Byrne grants have been successful in re-
ducing 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 Byrne-funded antidrug task forces in 
Texas, including cases of the falsification of Govern-
ment records, witness tampering, fabricating evi-
dence, false imprisonment, stealing drugs from evi-
dence lockers, selling drugs to children, large-scale 
racial profiling, sexual harassment, and other abuses 
of official capacity. Recent scandals in other States 
include the misuse of millions of dollars in Byrne 
grant money in Kentucky and Massachusetts, 
wrongful convictions based on police perjury in Mis-
souri, and negotiations with drug offenders to drop 
or lower their charges in exchange for money or ve-
hicles in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachu-
setts, 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-
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 arrest 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 
against the county government. On May 11, 2005, 
a magistrate judge found sufficient evidence that a 
Byrne-funded anti-drug 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) Byrne grant-related scandals have grown so 
prolific that the Texas legislature has passed several 
reforms in response to them, including outlawing ra-
cial profiling and changing Texas law to prohibit 
drug offense convictions based solely on the word of 
an undercover informant. The Criminal Jurispru-
dence Committee of the Texas House of Representa-
tives issued a report in 2004 recommending that all 
of the State’s federally funded antidrug task forces 
be abolished because they are inherently prone to 
corruption. The Committee reported, ‘‘Continuing to 
sanction task force operations as stand-alone law en-
forcement entities—with widespread authority to op-
erate at will across multiple jurisdictional lines—