Never Too Late for Justice

Ruben Navarrette Jr.

DALLAS -- When something goes wrong in the criminal justice system, it's never too late to try to make it right.

Exhibit A: Forty-five people in the Texas panhandle town of Tulia now have their hands on some rather sizable settlement checks.

The story dates back to a 1999 sting operation in which 46 people were charged with dealing drugs. They were released from jail and pardoned after serious questions were raised about the conduct of police and prosecutors. One of the defendants has since died. The other 45 sued, claiming the arrests were racially motivated.

Could be. Thirty-nine of the 46 defendants were black. The undercover officer who made the arrests -- Tom Coleman -- has acknowledged using the "n-word" in polite conversation.

Meanwhile, Swisher County District Attorney Terry McEachern has acknowledged in a deposition that he knew that Coleman had been untruthful in previous investigations. And yet he put the rogue lawman on the stand and built dozens of new cases on Coleman's testimony.

Now, it's McEachern who finds himself sitting at the defendant's table. Already sanctioned by the State Bar of Texas for violating the legal requirement to turn over to the defense exculpatory evidence that might have undercut Coleman's credibility, McEachern is now headed for a public hearing at which he will appeal the bar's ruling.

This has to be humbling for McEachern, and if so, that's what I call a happy ending. They could use one of those in Dallas County, where authorities are still dodging responsibility for a 2001 fake drug scandal in which a band of police informants planted bogus evidence -- pool chalk masquerading as cocaine -- on unsuspecting Mexican immigrants to collect "snitch fees" from the Dallas police department.

At least 26 innocent people were arrested, prosecuted and jailed. In all, 86 cases had to be dismissed by the Dallas County District Attorney's Office because they were tainted by the involvement of the drug cops and informants at the heart of the scandal.

It is still unclear whether police and prosecutors suspected something was amiss -- and failed to do anything about it. It also wouldn't hurt to know if prosecutors pushed through cases before they were solid enough to take to court, as has been suggested to me by narcotics officers.

It was supposedly to get to the bottom of all this that a "special prosecutor" was appointed late last year by District Attorney Bill Hill. The DA's choice was Dan Hagood, a Dallas attorney who in private practice represents criminal defendants who are being prosecuted by the same office he is now supposed to investigate. In such transactions, prosecutors have all the muscle. They can dismiss cases, reduce charges or recommend lenient sentences. And so, if you're a defense attorney, antagonizing prosecutors can be bad for business. And yet Hagood is supposed to be independent.

If you believe that, you're more gullible that those cops who couldn't tell one kind of white powder from another. When he was appointed, Hagood promised to "follow the roads wherever they lead." So far he has indicted three police officers and five informants, but no prosecutors. In fact, there hasn't even been a whisper from Hagood's office that prosecutors did anything wrong. Given that several of the people indicted were already brought up on charges in federal court for the same scandal, it appears the roads that Hagood has been following are leading him in circles.

This is no way to flush out a scandal. In fact, if all this were happening

in Washington, folks would say it was a case of the fox guarding the hen house. Imagine the outcry if it leaked out that those looking into the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had a financial or professional incentive to shade the truth. Why, we might conclude that the administration had no interest in getting to the bottom of anything, and that the only objective involved covering the backsides of the powerful but vulnerable.

Back in Tulia, a lawyer for the NAACP has declared an ugly chapter in

the city's history closed. One can't say as much in Dallas, where, in a storyline all its own, a rewriting of history may be under way. In Tulia, they're saying that, after all the lawsuits and national media attention, justice has finally been done. In Dallas, that day may never come.

Ruben Navarrette's e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com.