Our Story
DO JUSTICE. LOVE MERCY. WALK HUMBLY.
Friends of Justice is a criminal justice reform organization formed in response to the infamous Tulia drug sting of 1999, in which over half of Tulia’s black males were arrested, about 15% of the town’s black population. These defendants were convicted on the uncorroborated word of an undercover narcotics officer named Tom Coleman. The only evidence provided at trial was a tiny bag of white powder which, jurors were told, contained at least a trace of cocaine; but nothing but Coleman’s word tied the contents of that baggie to any of the defendants. No video or audio evidence was produced in court and Officer Coleman testified that he preserved the details of each transaction by writing the particulars on his leg.
Friends of Justice began as an alliance of Baptist ministers, farmers, school teachers, meat packing workers, fork lift drivers, defendants and their family members. We were united by the conviction that the men and women accused by the government had been presumed guilty from the outset and were being convicted because they were unable to prove their innocence. The Rev. Alan Bean, a local Baptist minister, worked closely with the defendants to investigate the drug sting, write letters to the editor protesting the sting, gain the attention of the media, and recruit national allies like the Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Midway through the course of eight jury trials the sordid details of Tom Coleman’s troubled past came to light. He left his last law enforcement job owing local merchants almost $7,000 in unpaid bills, and had been arrested in the course of the eighteen-month Tulia operation on theft charges filed by officials in a nearby county. Coleman, it was revealed, had earned a reputation for impulsive, racist and imbecilic behavior—at one point even kidnapping his own children. Tom Coleman’s credibility issues rendered his testimony virtually worthless, but that didn’t stop defendants from being convicted in one-day trials and sentenced to the longest prison terms allowed by law.
As the cases unfolded, Friends of Justice accumulated a litany of damning facts questioning the legitimacy of basing cases on the uncorroborated testimony of a deeply flawed witness and suggesting that Coleman had tampered with evidence. Gradually, a coalition of national advocacy groups organized around our narrative. The Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP recruited pro bono lawyers to defend the “Tulia 46” using legal arguments pioneered by Friends of Justice. The ACLU and the NAACP filed a civil rights lawsuit and the Texas Legislature passed a series of “Tulia Bills” designed to avoid a repetition of the Tulia fiasco. Ultimately, a national media scandal broke out in the New York Times, the Washington Post, 20/20 and Sixty Minutes. Facing public embarrassment, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a pardon to the Tulia defendants in August 2003 and a year later a $6,000,000 out-of-court settlement allowed the offending parties to avoid further litigation in civil court. By 2006, virtually every narcotics task force in Texas had disbanded and the federal Byrne grants used to fund these rogue entities had been thoroughly revamped.
The story of the Tulia drug sting empowered advocacy groups in Texas and across the nation to push for progressive reforms in the criminal justice system. Tulia was a turning point for the criminal justice reform movement, a transformation made possible by the innovative organizing of Friends of Justice. Learning from this victory, Friends of Justice established Operation Blind Justice, organizing in affected communities across Texas and Louisiana to restore due process protections to poor people of color.
