Friends of Justice

DO JUSTICE. LOVE MERCY. WALK HUMBLY.

The Alvin Clay Case

Alvin Clay, a hardworking Little Rock attorney, was convicted on June 4, 2008.  The only testimony linking him to a mortgage scam was provided by a fast food manager and street hustler named Donny McCuien.  McCuien had lied repeatedly to the government, inventing phantom deals out of whole cloth and grossly minimizing his own involvement in the scam.  The US attorney’s office had a hard choice: they could sponsor the testimony of a pathological liar or drop the charges.  They went with the liar.

The federal government launched an investigation of the African American attorney before they possessed any evidence of wrongdoing.  Mr. Clay had twice embarrassed the US Attorney’s office with charges of prosecutorial misconduct.  In 2000, he brought the federal government to the verge of scandal with his critique of a corrupt undercover narcotics operation.  More on the background to this case can be found here and live reports from the trial can be found here.

The Colomb Case

In the autumn of 2004, Ann Colomb of Church Point, Louisiana drove to New Orleans with her daughter Jennifer and her granddaughter Mariah to meet with Friends of Justice director Alan Bean. Two years later, Dr. Bean attended an intense two-week trial in Lafayette in which Ms. Colomb and three of her sons were convicted of conducting a ten-year crack cocaine conspiracy out of their FHA home in Church Point. Moved by the media coverage Dr. Bean’s daily dispatches stirred up in the local media, two inmates agreed to testify that the Colomb family had been convicted by a highly organized perjury ring operating in the federal prison system. When these two inmates stuck to their story at great personal cost, a federal judge ordered a thorough investigation which resulted in the full exoneration of the Colomb family. Ann Colomb is now a member of the Friends of Justice Board of Directors. The Colomb case was featured in the May edition of Reason magazine.

Jena, Louisiana

On the morning of September 1, 2006, three nooses dangled from a tree in the High School square in Jena, Louisiana. The day before, at a school assembly, black students had asked the vice principal if they could sit under that tree. Characterizing the noose incident as an innocent prank, a discipline committee meted out a few days of in-school suspension and declared the matter settled. At the end of November, the central academic wing of Jena High School was destroyed by fire and a stream of white-initiated racial violence swept over the tiny community. When classes resumed, a white student was punched and kicked following a lunch-hour taunting match. Six black athletes were arrested and charged with conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder. If convicted, some defendants are facing sentences of between twenty-five and 100 years in prison without parole. At the request of affected families in Jena, Friends of Justice director Alan Bean conducted a thorough investigation of the case and created an aggressive justice coalition involving Friends of Justice, the Louisiana branches of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The case is currently being covered by media as diverse as the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Chicago Tribune.

Jena residents, mostly family members of the accused students, in Baton Rouge

Bunkie, Louisiana

Friends of Justice has been conducting an investigation in Bunkie, Louisiana ever since Denise Adkins (pictured at the right, above) attended a public meeting in nearby Jena in early 2007. Recently, Dr. Bean interviewed a dozen Bunkie residents at a crawfish feed and went home with a plastic bag full of the delightful little morsels. The Bunkie story features allegations of racial profiling and police officers who appear to have graduated from the Tom Coleman School of law enforcement. Church Point, Jena and Bunkie symbolize a pattern of small town Southern injustice.

Tom Coleman Perjury Trial
Former Texas Lawman of the Year, Tom Coleman, was tried on perjury charges in January of 2005. Twenty members of Friends of Justice attended the trial and director Alan Bean published daily reports in the popular blog Grits for Breakfast. In the pictures above, Tom Coleman follows his entourage into the courthouse as one of Coleman’s victims, Freddie Brookins Jr., looks on. The ex-police officer was convicted and sentenced to a ten year probated sentence that effectively ends his sordid career in law enforcement.

Hearne

The fight for justice in Hearne, Texas began in November, 2000 when 15% of the town’s black population was arrested in pre-dawn raids on a low-income housing development. The Tulia story had just achieved national attention and, inspired by the stand of Friends of Justice, a small group of Hearne residents voiced their opposition to a drug sting based on the uncorroborated word of a drug addicted confidential informant. Eventually, the informant confessed that he had invented drug buys out of whole cloth in order to stay out of prison. Working in close cooperation with local leader Charles Workman (pictured above) Friends of Justice made seven visits to Hearne between 2000 and 2005. Eventually, Robertson County officials apologized for the incident and settled a civil suit with the sting victims.

Charles Workman, leader in Hearne, Texas. A young resident of the housing development victimized by the Hearne drug sting.

TABC Raid

In May of 2002, black-uniformed officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission burst into the back yard of Mario and Sylvia Rosales. Several dozen adults, high school graduates and children were forced to kneel on the ground with their hands behind their heads. When Sylvia Rosales protested this warrantless intrusion into a private graduation party she was arrested and hauled off to jail. Friends of Justice wove twenty eyewitness accounts of the TABC raid into a unified narrative, “Everybody on Your Knees” which was published in several independent publications in both English and Spanish. Embarrassed by the negative publicity, six members of the TABC administration in Austin flew to Tulia to meet with indignant family members at Tulia’s Junior High School. “Why do you come breaking into my home like people who have no morals?” Sylvia Rosales asked them. Shortly after this dramatic meeting the TABC fired two of the officers involved in the raid and re-wrote their search and seizure guidelines to prevent a reoccurrence of this outrage.