Louisiana's de-incarceration reforms

From a sidebar to a story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, here's a summary of the just-passed sentencing reforms from the Bayou State aimed at reducing their nation-leading incarceration rate:

Changes to Louisiana sentencing and parole laws in 2012

Amid increasing attention to Louisiana's world-leading incarceration rate, the 2012 Legislature adopted and Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed several measures that alter the state's sentencing and parole laws, primarily for nonviolent offenders whose crimes involved drugs or property. The Louisiana Sentencing Commission recommended nearly all of the changes. They include:

• Merger of separate pardon and parole boards (House Bill 518): Two members will be added to the five-member pardon board, and the seven-person panel, sitting as a "parole committee," will decide whether to release eligible prisoners on parole. The existing parole board will cease to exist.
• Discretion on mandatory minimums (House Bill 1068): Prosecutors, defendants and judges are given authority to make pre-trial plea agreements or post-trial sentencing agreements that call for lesser punishment than the minimum required in existing criminal statutes.
• Parole for nonviolent, second-time offenders (House Bill 1026): Certain second-time offenders, excluding those whose crimes were sexual in nature, could be eligible for a parole hearing after serving one-third of their sentences, rather than the current requirement of one-half.
• Parole for nonviolent offenders sentenced to life (House Bill 543): Certain nonviolent, good-behavior, low-risk lifers will be eligible for release earlier, including for the first time those sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The change excludes anyone whose crimes were sexual in nature. Inmates who were sentenced between the ages of 18 and 24 must serve at least 25 years to be eligible. Those sentenced between ages 25 and 34 must serve at least 20 years. Those sentenced between ages 35 and 49 must serve at least 15 years. Those sentenced at age 50 or older must serve at least 10 years.
• Expanded re-entry courts (House Bill 521): A pilot court program that assists released nonviolent offenders with job training and other re-entry issues will be expanded into two new judicial districts.
• Streamlined discipline for offenders on probation (House Bill 512): In certain instances, officers will be able to use administrative sanctions to discipline offenders without taking them back to court.

See another summary of the legislation from Pardon Power.

Louisiana: A rare state that looks enviously at Texas overincarceration

In its weeklong series, "Louisiana Incarcerated," the New Orleans Time-Picayune describes how Louisiana has overtaken Texas as the nation's incarceration leader, posting this graphic as evidence:

And here's a graphic describing two key reasons Texas' prison population has leveled off: Reduced probation and parole revocations.

Grits could offer a litany of other explanations, but those are biggies. See this admiring article about Texas' prison diversion reforms that led to these declines. There are only a handful of states that could look at Texas' incarceration rates and say "Wow, I wish we were that low." According to the Times-Picayune's data, Texas' incarceration rate (prisoners per 100,000 population) currently ranks fourth nationally, tied with Alabama behind Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma. Call it the Incarceration Belt.

Another story in the series describes with admiration Harris County's brief dalliance with Bayou State lockups and how Harris ended it's use of Louisiana contract beds through de-incarceration reforms. The private prisons and their Louisiana county partners loved the set up, though it was costing Harris County a small fortune:

"We didn't have any problems," said LaSalle Warden Jeff Windham, a former chief deputy of the LaSalle Parish Sheriff's Office. "Everything went fine."

READ THE
ENTIRE SERIES

Until the end of last year, when it all abruptly ended. The relationship didn't end because of anything LaSalle did wrong. It ended because of something Harris County did right.

The jail population in Harris County had dropped 31 percent in three years, and Sheriff Adrian Garcia, elected in 2008, announced he wouldn't be sending prisoners to Louisiana anymore, not to Olla and not to its other partner, an even further-flung private prison, the West Carroll Detention Center some seven hours from Houston in Epps.

Between them, Olla and Epps -- the latter one of a half-dozen detention centers run by the Emerald Prison Enterprises, another Louisiana-based outfit with facilities in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico as well as Louisiana -- had held as many as 1,200 of their inmates at a time, according to Harris County. But by the end of 2011, the average daily population of the Harris County Jail, which had once climbed above 12,000, had fallen below its capacity of 9,434 to 8,573 inmates.

For Olla and Epps, the breakup was tough. "We'll recoup, but it hit us pretty hard when they left," Windham said.

But for Harris County, the outcome confirmed that innovative efforts to reduce its population and curb recidivism were paying off. "It's been more successful than we anticipated," Garcia said. And it showed what can happen when a jail's bottom line is to reduce occupancy, not maintain it. 

The reporters rightly give most of the credit where it's due:

The biggest single factor in the drop in the Harris County Jail population was a decision not by Garcia, a Democrat, but by District Attorney Pay Lykos, a Republican, who also was elected in 2008.

Beginning in January 2010, the Harris County district attorney's office stopped bringing felony charges against those arrested with crack pipes or other drug paraphernalia that contained trace amounts -- less than one-hundredth of a gram -- of drug residue, not even enough to allow the defense to do its own independent testing. That alone meant that on any given day, there were 400 fewer inmates in the jail.

Meanwhile, with roughly a quarter of the jail population exhibiting some kind of mental-health problem requiring psychotropic medication, the county created a crisis-intervention team to respond to police calls when mental illness seemed a likely part of the mix and treatment might be more appropriate than jail.

Garcia doubled the number of chaplains in the jail from 100 to 200, mostly volunteers, and instituted a new earned early-release program for nonviolent offenders actively participating in an educational or vocational program.

See also an interview with Dallas drug-court Judge John Creuzot accompanying the series.

How Louisiana became the nation's prison capital

Check out an extended series from the New Orleans Times-Picayune titled, "Louisiana Incarcerated: How we built the nation's prison capital," which has its own web portal. A few years ago Texas competed with Louisiana for the highest incarceration rate, but ours has leveled off - even slightly declined - while theirs continues to climb. Here's a graphic from the series suggesting four reasons why:

How many tragedies must befall innocent people from false eyewitness IDs before police use scientifically valid methods?

I've been focused on Texas-based exonerations of wrongfully convicted inmates, especially in Dallas, but my brother brings word of another case just a couple of hours east of Dallas down I-20 in Shreveport, LA, where Rickey Johnson, 52, just got out of prison after doing 25 years of a life sentence for a sexual assault he didn't commit ("Leesville man freed after wrongful conviction," Shreveport Times, Jan. 12)

A rape victim made a positive identification that Johnson was her assailant, but:

DNA testing completed Dec. 21 determined that the Leesville man could not have raped a Many woman on July 12, 1982. The man who did was convicted in May 1984 of committing an aggravated rape April 30, 1983, at the same apartment complex

How many more such cases must we see before police practices and the rules of evidence are changed to strengthen eyewitness identifications?

What good argument is there for police not using double-blind lineup procedures with neutral administrators?

Given how many eyewitnesses simply get their ID's wrong, when will the Legislature require corroboration for victims who did not previously know the assailant (or for that matter, for informants who cut a deal for their testimony)?

I'd asked in a recent post how a value could be placed on wrongful convictions, and quoted my father, a civil defense attorney who said tort law allows compensation, among other things, for "lost consortium" with one's family and a more general loss of "companionship and society." Putting aside the legalese, what does that really mean? Here's an example:

During his 25 years of incarceration, Johnson has missed watching his four children grow. One was born just after he went to jail. He's kept in touch as best he could.

One son, a LSU engineering graduate, just moved to Baton Rouge. "I'm the only one he has now since his mother has passed."

And, of course, there are the grandchildren that he's never met.

How can this fellow ever really be compensated for what was taken from him? In my opinion, it's impossible, no matter how much money he's ultimately awarded (if any). He and others in his position deserve a legacy for what happened to them, not just a settlement.

The only way to adequately honor such an unfathomable loss is to strengthen protections against it happening again, adjusting policies and practices within the system that allowed his wrongful conviction to occur. Otherwise, compensating payments come to be considered just part of the cost of doing business (it's OPM - other people's money - to the pols, after all), and more wrongful convictions become nearly inevitable.

We know why wrongful convictions occur. What's missing is the political will from either major party to do what' necessary to minimize them in the future.

MORE: For more information on improved eyewitness identification practices see the website of UT El Paso's Eyewitness Identification Research Laboratory.

Texans head to LA to support Jena 6

Lots of Texans arrived in tiny Jena, Louisiana today along with folks from all over the country to rally in celebration of the court's vacation of charges against "the Jena 6," responding to a demonstration "conjured out of the ether of cyberspace," according to the Chicago Tribune. The Dallas South blog says 14 buses are headed to Jena from the DFW area, and the Houston Chronicle reported more than 400 Houstonians also made the trek. Mark Sorkin wrote in The Nation that organizers 20,000 people came, and to judge by this photo I don't doubt it.

I've not been following the case as closely as some other Texas bloggers, but watch Dallas South, Sorkin's blog Juvienation, and the Friends of Justice blog for more updates from the event.

San Antonio bribery scandal widens: Bexar County Sheriff indicted!

Allegations that a top political aide to Bexar County Sheriff Ralph Lopez (with silver hair at left) accepted bribes from a company that received a jail commissary contract have widened to include an indictment filed yesterday against the Sheriff himself!

(One imagines this will give the Sheriff less leverage with the District Attorney to convince her to allow new jail overcrowding solutions to proceed.)

Lopez, a Democrat, claims the Republican DA (with whom, incidentally, I've frequently disagreed) is pursuing him for partisan reasons. But I tend to doubt the Sheriff would have been indicted if he hadn't so defiantly defended his long-time campaign aide in the face of damning evidence.

Now Sheriff Lopez is on the hook, whatever happens - any opportunity to distance himself from the scandal has passed. According to the San Antonio Express News ("Lopez indicted on three counts," Aug. 17):

The indictments accused Lopez of accepting and failing to report a gift and an "honorarium" — both involving the same 2005 all-expenses paid golfing/fishing trip to Costa Rica — from a company he helped get the contract to run his jail's food commissaries.

In particular, the indictments allege that he solicited and accepted food, lodging, transportation and entertainment, including golfing and fishing, from two officials of Louisiana-based Premier Management Enterprises, which now runs the commissaries. One indictment labels the trip as a gift to a public servant; the other an "honorarium," or informal payment, that "was in consideration for services that the defendant would not have been requested to provide but for defendant's official position and duties." The third charges that he failed to report the gift on his personal financial disclosure form.

Lopez remains in office, as allowed by law for an official under indictment, but if found guilty, Lopez would be automatically disqualified for service and could end up behind bars.

Despite warrants issued for his arrest Thursday, Lopez never had to join his prisoners. After reporting to a judge, he was allowed to remain free on a personal recognizance bond.

The charges are the first to surface as part of a wider-ranging public corruption probe that District Attorney Susan Reed said focuses on the relationship between Premier, Lopez, his longtime campaign manager John Reynolds, members of a nonprofit board the sheriff set up and appointed to run the jail commissaries, and others. Attorneys for Premier did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

After testifying under subpoena for 45 minutes before the grand jury Thursday morning, Lopez said, "I've done nothing wrong."

A Democrat who recently announced he would run for re-election next year, Lopez called the 18-month investigation by Republican Reed "a political witch hunt."

I don't know anything more about the case than what's been reported in the press, but at least we now know for sure that Bexar judges know what a personal bond is and how to issue them. Sometimes I wonder. Misdemeanants in Bexar County who don't happen to be the Sheriff typically aren't so lucky.

Doing the Inmate Shuffle, and Singing the Contract Prison Bed Blues

A lot of inmates in Texas jails and prisons appear to have significant bus trips ahead of them if the ongoing shell game outlined in disparate, recent media reports continues. In the last few weeks, various jurisdictions have announced they plan to rent expensive jail and prison space from other jurisdictions and private vendors, often moving prisoners many hundreds of miles away.

Oddly, Texas both has quite a few prisoners coming into the state, and now some will begin to be transported out. Texas already has highest percentage of people on the planet under control of our criminal justice system. Don't you think that means the market is saturated? Where will it end?

Everywhere you look state and local governments are shuffling inmates around from facility to facility, state to state to manage their over-incarceration crisis, but sometimes it seems like we're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

We've got Idaho sending more of its inmates to Texas, but meanwhile, in Houston, the Harris County Jail is so full they must send inmates to a private jail in Louisiana.

In other words, when they squeeze the balloon in Idaho, prisoners wind up in West Texas. Squeeze the balloon in Harris County and they wind up in Louisiana. But those are just the highest profile examples.

Though so far it's been reported nowhere but on this blog, the Texas Youth Commission wants to send 10-13 year olds to private facilities, presumably in Texas (though I don't yet have the RFP). TYC also will parole or transfer to TDCJ all 19 and 20 year olds, if they haven't already, and about 500 misdemeanants supposedly will soon be released back to their home counties, according to media reports, where they might go home or be placed in a county facility.

In Tyler a leaky jail caused the Sheriff to ship 60 inmates to Upshur and Kaufman Counties. Elsewhere in Texas, Nacogdoches inmates bring in $900 per day in revenue to Gregg County, but obviously costs Nacogdoches taxpayers the same amount.

Meanwhile, California plans to send 8,000 prisoners out of state in the next few years despite four recent inmate deaths in out of state contract facilities - given trends in private capacity, I'll bet a lot of those wind up in Texas.

It's also becoming increasing clear based on the incidents at Geo units involving Idaho prisoners that Texas does not have an adequate regulatory structure to oversee private contract facilities. Most recently in Bexar County, a private prison firm allegedly bribed a top political aide to county Sheriff Ralph Lopez. That case was brought by local prosecutors - the Texas Commission on Jail Standards has neither the staff nor authority to investigate or fix those kind of problems.

I know I sound like a broken record, but there are many other means to reduce jail overcrowding than to rent beds out of county or build more jails. Here are two posts with links to a lot of different ideas being tried in jurisdictions around the state. I'll bet some of them would work in the county where you live:

• Grits' best practices to reduce county jail overcrowding
• Grits best practices to reduce county jail overcrowding: Part Two

Tulia Friends of Justice publicizing student civil rights struggle in rural Louisiana

Now John T. Ford was workin' for the Ku Klux Klan.
At six foot five John T was a helluva man.
Made a lot of money selling sheets on the family plan.

- Willie Nelson, Shotgun Willie

Normally I rigorously try to restrict Grits coverage to Texas topics because, with 23+ million people, more than 2,500 separate law enforcement agencies, 254 counties and three of the ten largest US metropolae, I can't do a remotely thorough job of tracking what's going on here in the Lone Star State.

But our friend and former Grits guest blogger Rev. Alan Bean and his wife Nancy have been doing outstanding work through their group Friends of Justice, traveling from Tulia to Jena, Louisiana to publicize a case that's drawing international attention. And when my brother forwarded an article about their work in Louisiana (he's a minister in Shreveport), I knew it'd reached a pretty deep saturation level and I'd better get something up about the case on Grits!

If you haven't followed what's been happening in Jena, the Friends of Justice blog is a great place to start. And if Alan and Nancy's family commitment wasn't enough, their lovely and talented daugher Lydia, who just between us is probably the sharpest of the bunch, just had a terrific column published on Beliefnet that gives a fine one-stop overview of the case. Here's an excerpt from Lydia's column that gives a taste of the distasteful situation brewing in Jena:

It all started in Jena, Louisiana when white students hung three nooses in a tree at the high school courtyard, to warn black students that only white kids got to sit under the shade of that tree. The nooses appeared after several black students asked a school administrator if they could sit underneath that tree, and the administrator had given them the only answer he could legally give: that they could sit wherever they wanted. But it became obvious where the school administration's sympathies lay. They dismissed the noose incident as an innocent prank and a discipline committee meted out a few days of in-school suspension to the young white men who had taken credit.

The following day, black students staged a spontaneous protest rally under the tree where the nooses had been discovered. Six black male athletes took the lead in this protest. Immediately, the school held an emergency school assembly to address their problem…no, their problem wasn't the hate crime, it was black students protesting the hate crime. With a dozen fully uniformed police officers in the auditorium, the town's District Attorney Reed Walters warned protest organizers that with a stroke of his pen he could take their lives away. After the demonstration under the tree, white teachers branded these six leaders of the protest as "troublemakers": Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Mychal Bell, Theodore Shaw, Jesse Beard and Bryant Ray Purvis. Over the next few months, white teachers looked for any reason to crack down on them and brand them as bad kids.

At the end of November, the central academic wing of Jena High School was destroyed by fire (the smoke damage is evident in the picture above). Over the weekend, a stream of white-initiated racial violence swept over the tiny community, adding to the trauma and tension. The following Monday, 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—for a schoolyard fight in which no one was seriously injured. After Friends of Justice attracted international media attention to the "Jena 6," the district attorney was forced to lower the charges, but not by much. D.A. Walters was confident that he could get an all-white jury to convict these young men, no matter what the evidence.

He was right. Last Thursday, June 28, 2007, Mychal Bell was convicted of aggravated second degree assault and conspiracy to commit secondary degree aggravated assault. The alleged assault was "aggravated" because a dangerous weapon was used—namely tennis shoes. Mychal is a strong student who planned to go to college, but he could be 40 before he gets out of prison.

Mychal's defense attorney didn't even try to mount a defense. He could have called reliable witnesses to the stand to testify that Mychal didn't throw a punch in this fight. Most of the prosecution's witnesses who fingered Mychal as a "ring leader" in this fight had changed their stories in recent weeks: When they were first interviewed, none of them could even remember if Mychal had even been present at the fight. They only remembered that a bunch of "black kids" were there. But after the town's white community identified Mychal as a "troublemaker" for protesting the hate crime, these witnesses "remembered" that Mychal was the instigator in the fight. Psychologists tell us that memory is notoriously unreliable, and that social pressure motivates people to "remember" what suits them.

All over our country, young black males have been so demonized by our culture that it is almost impossible for them to get a fair trial. We know that our criminal justice system defies God's purposes when young black men are prosecuted for attempted murder for a school fight while their town stands behind the perpetrators of a hate crime. In Jena—as in Iraq—our nation is learning the hard way that true peace only flows from justice.

But politicians will never stand up for poor black teenagers like Mychal Bell unless people of faith embarrass them into doing the right thing. The church must witness to God's purposes for the criminal justice system. Our God is a God of justice, who holds judges and rulers to account when they crush people who are made in God's image. If we want to be the people of God, we must defend equal justice for the poor. If Christians hold out this prophetic vision, we will inspire Americans from all traditions to hold our government to a higher standard.

You might also be interested in reading an account by a New Orleans civil rights attorney on this disturbing case. Bully for the Bean clan and everyone they're working with in Jena and elsewhere to bring these injustices to light.

Prison Break - Live!

If only Fox TV were there to film it - these guys seemed to have a less elaborate, more effective plan than on the TV series. Here's another incident to remind us that police corruption isn't just a problem on the Mexican side of the border.

The Edinburg police officer charged this spring with drug smuggling (who Grits reported on here) busted out of a private prison in South Texas Tuesday along with five gang members, according to the McAllen Monitor, ("Authorities suspect prison break was inside job," Sept. 21), possibly with inside help from someone at the facility. "They were among approximately 950 inmates held at the East Hidalgo Detention Center, a federal prison privately run by a Louisiana company, LCS Correctional Services."

The facility has a history of similar problems. "Two inmates — one held on a capital murder charge — also escaped from the La Villa facility in 2000, when it was run by another company named Texson. LCS took over the complex from Texson in 2001, when LCS officials say the previous owner went bankrupt. In that incident, authorities apprehended one escapee within 24 hours, but took two more years to apprehend the second," the Monitor reported.

The Children of Belial

This is the twelfth in a series of posts inspired by a federal drug conspiracy case targeting a middle aged housewife and three of her children.

Jezebel is the quintessential witchy-woman. Though her sins were many, her fate was sealed by an innocuous affair in Jezreel, the site of the royal palace. Jezebel may have been the power behind the throne but her husband Ahab was the titular king. And Ahab was moaning and bitching about his neighbor Naboth, the man who wouldn’t sell him his vineyard. Ahab wanted that vineyard. He wanted it bad. It was all he could think about. After a long night watching her idiot husband pacing the floor Jezebel decided to restore tranquility to her household.

The following day the elders and nobles of Jezreel received a letter bearing Ahab’s seal and signature. They were ordered to find two “children of Belial” willing to accuse Naboth the Jezreelite of blaspheming against God and the king. (“Children of Belial” is one of those odd expressions one finds in the King James Version. In more recent translations it is rendered as “scoundrels” or “worthless fellows”.) The children of Belial were needed because the law of Israel declared that no one could be condemned except on the testimony of two credible witnesses. So the search was on for two compromised individuals who would rat out their grandmothers for thirty pieces of silver.

Jezebel’s plot unfolded without a hitch and Naboth was dragged outside the city gates and stoned to death. Jezebel informed her clueless husband that he could take possession of his blessed vineyard.

Enter Elijah, the prophet of Jehovah. He appeared as Ahab was gleefully checking out his new digs. Dispensing with pleasantries, Elijah proclaimed the word of the Lord: because Ahab had profited from dirty-deeds-done-dirt-cheap all his male heirs (literally those “that pisseth against a wall”) would meet a violent end.

Ahab could have stolen a page from his ancestor Adam by blaming the evil business on his wife; but the Bible says the king humbled himself and took the blame like a man. True, he hadn’t known the details of Jezebel’s plan, nor had he directly accused Naboth or tossed a pebble in his direction. But Ahab knew what lay at the root of the evil: his insatiable appetite for acquisition.

I have talked a lot in this series of posts about Dexter Harmon and the other “children of Belial” the government used to convict the Colomb-Davis family. But Dexter isn’t the chief villain here. Jerry Stutes and Brett Grayson made Dexter an offer he couldn’t refuse. The context of their conversation made the following conversation redundant: “Look Dexter, we’re going to ask you a question, and before you answer you should know that a positive answer wins you a get-out-of-jail-free card and a negative answer leaves you languishing in hell?”

Brett Grayson looks and talks like a cross between Don Rickles and Dick Cheney. Like his former boss, John Ashcroft, Grayson is a fervent Pentecostal. Unfortunately, in the Colomb-Davis story the assistant U.S. attorney plays the role of Jezebel. Jezebel didn’t bear any personal animus toward Naboth nor was she irrationally prejudiced against Jezreelites. But Jezebel was losing sleep because of Ahab and his damned vineyard and killing Naboth was the best way to restore peace to her household.

Brother Brett Grayson has nothing personal against Ann Colomb and her family. But he is occupationally married to the United States government, a partner with an insatiable appetite for incarceration. Mr. Grayson incarcerates drug dealers because it’s easy. Every conviction creates another child of Belial; the more draconian the sentence the more pliable the children become.

But Elijah wasn’t sent to Jezebel and my complaint isn’t with a solitary assistant U.S. attorney. The problem in Israel was that Jezebel had the power to make offers nobody could refuse.

I am firmly convinced that the vast majority of assistant U.S. attorneys wouldn’t have touched the Colomb-Davis case even if they thought it was a slam dunk. Prosecutions based entirely on the uncorroborated testimony of children of Belial are inherently dangerous.

But the core problem isn’t Brother Brett per se; the problem is the unfettered power to coerce that Brother Brett has been given.

This boils down to Danny and Dexter. Danny Davis isn’t any more innocent than his mother and his brothers; but his innocence is singularly obvious. Danny has never been convicted of a felony; he moved away from Church Point four years before his parent’s home was raided; for years he slaved as a garbage-man while carrying a full academic load at a business college; and he wasn’t added to the federal indictment until Dexter Harmon dropped his name in February of 2002.

In the Colomb-Davis case, Dexter Harmon is the fountainhead of uncorroborated snitch testimony: the only inmate witness who actually knew Edward and Danny when they were old enough to drive. By their own admission, the original cadre of inmate witnesses was part of Dexter’s crack ring in Rayne, Louisiana and their testimony was shaped by Dexter’s coaching.

Once again it’s Naboth the Jezreelite against a child of Belial and the only question is who we are going to believe? Twenty-eight hundred years after Naboth was stoned twelve jurors in Lafayette, Louisiana were persuaded by a child of Belial.

But I repeat: the problem is the coercive power a frightened nation has handed its prosecutors.

They're Doing it Again!

This is the eleventh in a series of posts inspired by a federal drug conspiracy case targeting a middle aged housewife and three of her children.

When instant replay made its debut back in the 60s my mother had a hard time adapting. “Oh no,” she would wail, “They’re doing it again!”

That’s the way I felt when Ann Colomb told me her story in a McDonalds on Canal Street in New Orleans in the autumn of 2004. The perjury trial of Tom “trust me” Coleman was just a few months away and my mother’s lament flashed through my mind: “Oh no, they’re doing it again!”

At first glance the Tulia fiasco and the Colomb story are quite dissimilar. In Tulia there was one sketchy undercover cop and dozens of defendants; in Louisiana there were four defendants and dozens of people (cops and robbers) pointing the accusing finger. But in both cases innocent people went to prison on the basis of uncorroborated testimony plus nothing.

When I made my concerns about Coleman public in March of 2000 I wasn’t convinced that the undercover man had fabricated every case on every defendant. But Coleman reminded me of the sleazy LAPD cops busted in the Ramparts scandal—I didn’t trust him. Tom would get on the witness stand, tell a story about a narcotics transaction and the defendant du jour would go to prison . . . over and over again. Tom had no real evidence but he said he hated dope and dope dealers—and that was enough for eight juries.

In the Colomb case, it has been more of the same. Dexter Harmon tells the jury that Danny Davis was moving millions of dollars of crack cocaine back in the day and Danny goes to prison. Neither Tom Coleman nor Dexter Harmon could produce a shred of evidence to back up their claims and both men had motive and opportunity to lie.

This kind of prosecution scares the hell out of me. Innocent people went to prison in Tulia, and I am utterly convinced that Ann Colomb and her sons are entirely innocent of the charges leveled against them between 1993 and 2006.

The new element in the Colomb case is the promiscuous use of uncorroborated snitch testimony. If Tom Coleman, a certified police officer, lacked credibility what are we to make of men like Dexter Harmon? By the time the Colomb-Davis case went to trial in March of 2006, assistant U.S. attorney Brett Grayson had assembled thirty-two (count ‘em) jailhouse witnesses eager to tie Ann and the boys to hundreds of kilos of crack cocaine. The trial was delayed when Judge Tucker Melancon ruled that sixteen snitches should be quite sufficient for Mr. Grayson’s purposes. Grayson appealed this ruling to the 5th Circuit which decided that Melancon should at least give Grayson’s snitches a hearing to assess their credibility.

How does a judge or a jury assess the credibility of a snitch who can’t corroborate his story? Everyone knew these guys were testifying in exchange for time cuts, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were lying. Eventually, Melancon made room for thirty-one snitches witnesses.

Dexter was the most intelligent, articulate and persuasive inmate the prosecutor had at his disposal so he went first. He had actually lived in Church Point and could identify Ann’s boys without difficulty—they had been regulars at his club after all. It was a bit of a stretch to believe that high school freshmen and sophomores were drug kingpins, a problem that probably occurred to Harmon himself. When he talked to Grayson and Stutes back in 2002, Harmon was talking about enormous transactions involving dozens of kilos; under oath he would only say he had sold a little over a kilo to Edward and a little less than a kilo to Danny.

But the glaring contradictions in Dexter’s testimony were offset by his new status as a born again child of King Jesus. “When I terrorized the streets I worked for the devil,” he told the jury. But “I’ve come to know Christ and brought many people to the gospel.” Brett Grayson’s star witness had even organized an impromptu Bible study right in the joint.

Harmon was followed by three of the men who had worked in Dexter’s Rayne operation: Cleveland “Gotti” Benoit, John Roberts and Marcus Ledet. Of the three, only Ledet had ever met Danny and Edward—and that was when the boys were all in junior high school. Ledet’s brother Marvin had signed an affidavit stating that Marcus had invented his testimony out of thin air in exchange for a time cut. “My brother should repent to God for lyin’ like that on Miss Ann and her family,” Marvin once told me.

Cleveland Benoit told the jury that Dexter Harmon had written him to say that the government was investigating the Colomb family. “Gotti” Benoit then passed the word to his buddy Marcus Ledet as the two men washed dishes in the kitchen of the Beaumont Low federal prison.

In the end, Brett Grayson only called twelve of his snitch witnesses. Midway through the trial a letter arrived at the U.S. attorneys’ office in Lafayette from an inmate in the Three Rivers, Texas federal prison with the unlikely name of Quinn Alex (not surprisingly everyone calls him “Alex Quinn”). The Texas inmate said he had paid $2200 to one of Grayson’s lead snitches in exchange for information that supposed to have allowed him to testify against a federal drug defendant in exchange for a time cut. When Mr. Alex got nothing for his money he wrote his lawyer to complain. Unlike Dexter and the boys, Alex had Western Union records to back up his contention.

Shortly after lawyering up and taking the fifth, Alex testified that he had heard Edward Colomb’s name being talked up in more than one Texas prison—more than that he wouldn’t say. But moments after Ann Colomb and her son’s were convicted, the boys were approached by Quinn Alex and a second inmate both of whom said they had seen Dexter Harmon, Marcus Ledet, Cleveland Benoit and three other snitches getting their testimony straight.

The jury was probably relieved when Mr. Grayson called his snitch parade to a halt in mid procession, but they had no idea why.

Throughout most of the trial I was confident that Ann, Danny, Edward and Sammy’s nightmare would soon be over. But the night before the verdict was handed down I awoke in the middle of the night convinced that convictions were inevitable. The sense of helpless horror I had experienced in the Tulia courtroom years earlier had me in its icy grip. “They’re doing it again,” I thought, “and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

The Social World of a Drug Kingpin

This is the tenth in a series of posts inspired by a federal drug conspiracy case targeting a middle aged housewife and three of her children.

Once the Colomb name entered the federal prison grapevine everybody wanted a piece of the action. It began with young black men living within a one hundred mile radius of Church Point. Next, convicted dealers from Houston started contacting Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson. According to their stories, Edward and Danny would buy drugs in the parking lots outside of a Houston strip joint, a 7-11 or a Whataburger.

Danny’s white Mustang 5.0 figured prominently in these stories long after the car had gone back to the finance company. Testifying to the grand jury in 2002, one inmate reported that Danny was at the wheel of a white 5.0. Asked if that was a Mustang the witness mumbled, “I guess.”

Eventually, inmates as far away as Midland, Texas (over 700 miles from Church Point) were informing on the Colombs.

The lives of Edward Henry and Danny Davis changed dramatically once they left High School in 1994. The adulatory write-ups in the local paper were gone and their social world had been systematically dismantled. The Carrier Club 88 was closed by 1995 and the Boulevard, Church Point’s youth drag, was also history. Whenever the boys got behind the wheel chances were good they would be pulled over by the Church Point police. Consequently, their social universe was almost entirely confined to their parent’s home.

Danny Davis and his brothers Edward and Randy were all dating white girls by the mid-90s. The boys were still popular with the girls and, with other social options eliminated, the Colomb residence became a substitute hangout. It was the only place white and black kids could interact without attracting negative attention.

Even so, the white girls who spent a lot of time at Ann’s place could expect to be pulled over for trivial traffic infractions after every visit to the Colomb residence. Tickets were rarely written, but questions abounded: “What were you doing at the Colombs? Don’t you know they deal drugs?”

Sometimes the remarks got personal. “What’s a good looking girl like you doing around a bunch of niggers? You’re too good for that.” (I have interviewed half a dozen white girls who frequented the Colomb home during the mid-to-late 90s and they all report this kind of harassment.)

Ann Colomb told her boys to keep a written record of every encounter with the police. A steady stream of young black males was now coming to Ann with horror stories of their own. Ann would accompany them to the courthouse and charges were repeatedly dropped when defendants refused to accept plea offers.

Edward Henry changed his surname to Colomb and married Tacha, his childhood sweetheart. He worked concrete under the remorseless Louisiana sun and endured the constant traffic stops with a sense of stoic fatalism. Tacha never saw him cry, but his mood was somber and he seem convinced that he was destined for prison no matter how hard he worked to avoid it. In the two weeks leading up to his wedding Edward was assessed $1600 in traffic tickets. He spent the ten days leading up to the blessed day in the local lockup because he didn’t have the money to pay the fines.

But Edward refused to leave Church Point. He worried about his parents and wanted to be there for them.

More sensitive by nature than his older brother, Danny Davis was on a slow slide into chronic depression. He told his therapist that if the police would leave him alone he could pull himself together. One day when a local cop gave him the finger, Danny snapped. “You’re just doing what you do because you know I can’t do nothing about it,” Danny roared. “Step out from behind that badge and I’ll whip your ass!”

This kind of response, though understandable, simply deepened his adversarial relationship with the local authorities.

Then Danny met Elizabeth Carrier, the daughter of a white Catholic family from nearby Carencro. Elizabeth grew tired of being stopped by the police every time she drove to Church Point and eventually talked Danny into moving to Opelousas, a larger town fifteen miles to the north. At the time Danny was driving an $800 1983 Buick Riviera with $1900 rims. He sold the rims to finance the move and started working construction.

When the transmission on the Riviera went out Danny was too poor to repair it so for two years he asked for a push to get rolling and parked with the wheels against the curb.

While in Opelousas, Danny enrolled in a technical college, working toward a degree in business machine repair. Danny hadn’t been much of a student in high school and it hadn’t helped when his teachers winked and gave him passing grades he hadn’t earned. But things were different now. Danny was up at six in the morning; he worked construction till five in the afternoon, then showered and drove to his evening classes. When they moved to Lafayette a year later he worked the graveyard shift as a garbage man and kept attending classes.

Graduation brought a decent job with a grown-up salary, a mortgage, and a new sense of self-respect. Elizabeth’s parents had grown up in Church Point and they were horrified by the idea of their daughter dating a black man. Rumors that Danny came from a drug dealing family didn’t help. Rodney Carrier knew he couldn’t stop his daughter from marrying Danny, so he screwed up his courage and paid him a visit. Danny told him he didn’t sell drugs and didn’t use drugs. Moreover, he loved Elizabeth and wanted to support and protect her. The two men embraced and Rodney drove home.

As Rodney and Lois Carrier became acquainted with the flesh-and-blood Danny Davis their concerns melted away along with the racial prejudice they had imbibed with their mothers’ milk. Danny started attending a Bible study at the Catholic Church in Carencro and on Wednesday evenings he and Rodney would knock back a few Bud Lites and talk about God.

Everything changed on October 22nd, 2001. At first only Ann and Edward were part of the alleged drug conspiracy. But one spring day, while rolling up to his parents place in Church Point, Danny Davis so a police car pull in behind him. The nightmare was back.

That Voodoo that You Do So Well

This is the ninth in a series of posts inspired by a federal drug conspiracy case targeting a middle aged housewife and three of her children.

Dexter Harmon had been in the federal prison system for two years when Jerry Stutes and Brett Grayson paid a call. Several of his former associates had snitched on Dexter and Dexter had snitched on the people up the ladder from him—particularly the kingpin of kingpins, John Timothy Cotton of Houston. This testimony was part of the massive Operation Rap Crack which nailed fifty-two defendants prior to Tim Cotton’s three-week trial in 2004 that resulted in a life sentence.

Dexter Harmon could honestly claim that he knew Danny and Edward. The two young men had been celebrated high school athletes when the Carrier Club was at its prime. Danny Davis’s picture was in the paper on a weekly basis in 1994 and anyone who followed high school athletics knew him by sight.

Harmon told Grayson and Stutes that Danny Davis was a bigger drug dealer than his brother Edward. This came as a shocking revelation. Jerry Stutes hadn’t even brought a picture of Danny Davis with him to Yazoo City; but he promised to rectify that oversight.

The Tim Cotton operation reputedly shipped crack cocaine from Houston to towns in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Louisiana. Operating out of Rayne, a town just south of Church Point, Dexter Harmon was Tim Cotton’s central supplier in western Louisiana. At Cotton’s trial, Harmon testified that he had traveled extensively throughout the United States and had made several money laundering runs to the Dominican Republic, once with hundreds of thousands of dollars stuffed inside a Nissan Maxima.

Big time dealers like Dexter Harmon get most of their money in small bills from street level dealers making dozens of nickel-and-dime deals a day. Crack rocks sell for between five and twenty dollars, money which can’t be banked in volume without raising suspicions. Dexter took a plea when he realized the government had phone records showing he had been in constant contact with his associates in Houston and receipts showing he had repeatedly wired vast sums via Western Union.

After Tim Cotton’s trial the government tried to entice media interest by publicizing the fact that Dexter Harmon, working on Tim Cotton’s orders, had paid a Voodoo priestess in the Dominican Republic half a million dollars to place a hex on the United States government.

A small coterie of mid-level dealers from the Rayne area procured their drugs from Harmon; most of these guys had been regulars at the Carrier Club 88 in the early 90s. As soon as the feds took their leave, Dexter Harmon fired off a letter to one of his former associates, Cleveland “Gotti” Benoit, a drug dealer who had once performed in Dexter Harmon’s rap group. The “Gotti” label was probably stolen from Irv Gotti, the head of Rap label Murder Inc. before he was busted by the feds on tax evasion and narcotics charges.

The link between Hip Hop icons and the drug culture was as obvious and intentional. Many rappers portrayed themselves as desperate crack slingers on the run from the cops. Sometimes art mimicked reality; more often the gangsta posturing was just a cheap marketing ploy. But the result was that any black male associated with rap music was suspect—even if he had just cranked up a TuPac tune on his system. Even the title “Operation Rap Crack” suggests an intimate association between black music and drug crime. Stevie Charlot had once toured Europe and the United States as a drummer with Beau Jocque and the Zydeco Hi-Rollers before the band leader died of a heart attack and Stevie succumbed to a crack addiction.

The day before Stevie Charlot allegedly bought crack from Ann and Edward Colomb, Cleveland “Gotti” Benoit wrote his defense attorney begging for an opportunity to rat on somebody. His plea bargain was dependant on his willingness to roll over on Dexter Harmon and his kingpin buddies, but when these guys copped pleas Benoit was out of luck. “If nothing happens to me and I have to do the rest of my sentence,” he lamented to his attorney, “I’ll be the only one [from the Rayne area] who didn’t benefit from helping the government.”

The government’s snitch system is predicated on the draconian mandatory minimum sentences Congress has attached to federal drug sentences and the fact that parole has been abolished from the federal system. When you give a man like Cleveland Benoit twenty years without parole he gets desperate. He's supposed to. Short days after receiving Harmon’s letter, Benoit fired off a missive to Brett Grayson. “Threw a few of my sources (sic)” Gotti had learned that Grayson was investigating “the Cologne brothers.”

On May 13, 2002, Benoit received a visit from Jerry Stutes. Dexter Harmon’s ex-flunky had little trouble picking Edward and Danny out of a photo array; they were the only ones featured in head-and-shoulder shots. Benoit told the investigator that he had served as Harmon’s back-up man whenever he ran short of drugs. Since Benoit got his drugs from Harmon this was an odd arrangement. Dexter ran out of drugs a lot—Benoit reported weekly transactions of approximately $7,000.

Marcus Ledet learned about the Colomb investigation while washing dishes with Cleveland Benoit at the Beaumont Low federal prison. On April 26, 2002, an enthusiastic Ledet contacted Brett Grayson. “I was told you were investigating the Culone brothers from Church Point, Louisiana,” the letter began, “on charges following their past and future.”

The repeated misspelling of the Colomb name probably originated with Dexter Harmon. Edward Colomb went by the surname “Henry” in the mid-1990s which means the “Colomb” name had to be supplied by Grayson and Stutes.

By the time a grand jury convened in May of 2002, Stutes and Grayson had interviewed most of Dexter Harmon’s former associates from the Rayne area. Before long, Danny and Edward Culone-Cologne had been tied to 250 kilos of crack cocaine with a street value of $65 million.

But the government had a problem: there were no phone logs, no money wires, and no clear social connection between grown men like Dexter Harmon and high school kids like Danny and Edward who hadn’t started shaving when they were supposedly selling millions of dollars of crack every week.

Brett Grayson might have asked himself how Ann Colomb’s boys could have done over three million crack deals by themselves—that’s a thousand deals every day. Although the indictment referred to “unindicted co-conspirators” no names were ever mentioned. The problems deepen when you consider the post-high school career of Danny Davis.

A Bumpin' Club

This is the eighth in a series of posts inspired by a federal drug conspiracy case targeting a middle aged housewife and three of her children.

Brett Grayson and Jerry Stutes wanted to talk to Dexter Harmon, a smooth-talking entrepreneurial spirit who had been sent to federal prison in March of 2000 on the strength of inmate “snitch” testimony. The resilient Harmon quickly turned the snitch game to his own advantage, shaving his multi-decade sentence down to a mere six years by spilling the beans on his drug world associates.

Jerry Stutes remembered Dexter Harmon as the proprietor of the Carrier Club 88 in Church Point, Louisiana between 1989 and 1993. If the Colomb family were involved in a narcotics conspiracy, Dexter would know about it.

The Carrier Club 88 was named in honor of local sports legend Mark Carrier who starred as wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the late 80s and early 90s. Dexter Harmon put little Church Point (pop. 5,000) on the map by booking big-city DJ’s and hungry rappers from Houston’s burgeoning Hip Hop scene.

But music wasn’t the only thing Harmon imported from Houston—the club was a drug haven. Patrons could see people snorting lines of powdered cocaine in the bathroom and drug deals went down from the minute the doors opened in the early evening till closing time at 2:00. The Rapper up on the stage was often smoking a joint, and the sweet aroma of marijuana was ubiquitous.

The Carrier Club was exciting because it was dangerous. The club was famous for its fights. The violence didn’t break out randomly; it was choreographed by visiting DJ’s.

“Is Rayne in the house?” the DJ would holler. The boys from Rayne would signal their presence with a roar. “Is Crowley in the house?” Another roar. “Is Lafayette in the house?”

Then the DJ would get down to business. “Now last week the brothers from Church Point kicked a little Crowley ass and I got one question—is Crowley gonna let that happen again?”

Boys from the Church Point and Rayne would square off in the middle of the dance floor as chairs were moved to the walls and a circle of humanity closed in around the combatants.

The Colomb boys were just entering High School when the Carrier Club hit its stride in the early 90s, but being underage was no problem—Dexter Harmon would turn you away at the front entrance and an associate would let you in at a side door. Wannabe Thugs slipped their guns into a girlfriend’s handbag then passed through Dexter’s metal detector. On Friday nights Harmon brought in strippers and on Sunday nights he would provide free food for the block parties he threw for patrons who arrived too late to get into the crowded club.

At 2:00 a.m. everyone would wander over to the Boulevard (the local youth drag) or hang out at the Sweet Shop, a fast food joint that stayed open late. The local police would start pulling over cars and writing tickets.

Dexter Harmon kept local politicians at bay for years by contributing generously to their campaigns. The Carrier Club was almost entirely segregated because white boys, intimidated by the gangsta culture that Dexter imported to bucolic Church Point. But things were getting out of hand. The local police had to call for back up when the vast throng of inebriated revelers became more than they could handle.

As the Carrier Club was enjoying its halcyon days in the early 90s the all-white Boulevard was gradually becoming integrated. In the small town south, football and church dominate the social life of every town with basketball running a distant third. Edward Colomb was a highly rated point guard during his high school years and college scouts would often be in the stands checking him out. His brother, Danny Davis, smashed every rushing record on the books in 1993, rushing for well over 100 yards a game and scoring two or three touchdowns a game. White girls were interested and the interest was reciprocated. In the early nineties all four of Ann Colomb’s sons had white girlfriends.

The response from the white community was swift and decisive. In 1993, while driving home from a pick-up basketball game in the black end of town, the car Edward Colomb and Sammy Davis were riding in was pulled over by a swarm of police officers. When the car was searched a marijuana cigarette and some suspicious looking crumbs were discovered. Edward and Sammy were searched and came up clean, but one of the boys they had been riding with was in acute physical distress. When his stomach was pumped at the hospital he told the police he had swallowed several rocks of crack cocaine.

Sheriff’s Deputy Dale Thibodeaux informed administrators at the High School that Sammy and Edward were drug dealers and they were summarily expelled. Ann and James Colomb sued the school board and the regional media gave the David-Goliath conflict a lot of play. Eventually, after Edward had missed two months of basketball, the boys were reinstated and the Colombs dropped their suit. Edward and Sammy pled no contest to possession charges, a decision the family would live to regret.

Randy Henry, the youngest of Ann Colomb’s four sons, dated a black girl named Margeaux Coleman during his high school years. An outstanding athlete and president of the National Honor Society, Margeaux was selected as valedictorian of her graduating class. A stunning beauty, she was selected as Homecoming Queen in 1995—the first black girl to win that distinction.

During the halftime coronation raucous boos filled the air and black-on-white fights broke out in stands and spilled over into the parking lot. Gunfire was heard throughout the town. One grocery store owner stood in front of his place with a shotgun, firing randomly into the air and declaring that no niggers would enter his place that night.

The following year Church Point selected David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon as the Grand Marshall of the white Mardi Gras parade (the black community, in accordance with tradition, has a separate parade). The message wasn’t subtle.

When another black girl was selected as homecoming queen the following year the school board quietly voted to discontinue the homecoming queen tradition. A court would be elected, but no queen would be crowned.

It was against this social backdrop that Danny Davis was arrested in 1995. Deputy Troy Hebert said he saw a drug dealer approach Danny’s white Mustang 5.0 and complete a hand-to-hand transfer before selling drugs to an undercover officer. Uneasy about taking such sketchy evidence to court, local officials tried to coerce Danny into taking a plea bargain. Danny refused.

A year later, Dale Thibodeaux and police officers from several regional jurisdictions broke into the home of Danny’s white girlfriend. A gun was pressed to Danny’s temple and his girlfriend, her mother, and even her infant son were also restrained at gunpoint while the house was searched. When the search came up empty Dale Thibodeaux grabbed Danny’s arm and dragged him triumphantly down the front steps where a news team, camera at the ready, was waiting to capture the arrest of a drug kingpin for the local market. Once again Danny was asked to accept a plea bargain; once again he refused.

By the mid 1990s Church Point was a transformed community. The Boulevard had been shut down. White girls who had dated Ann Colomb’s sons had been transferred to the Sacred Heart Academy in a nearby town. In 1997 a young black man who had driven from Arkansas to Church Point stopped Randy Henry and asked him where he could find the Carrier Club 88. When Randy said Dexter’s club had been closed for two years the young man was devastated. “Really,” he said, “Man, I heard that was a bumpin’ club.”

By 1997 Dexter Harmon was actively exploiting his contacts in Houston. This was the part of the story Brett Grayson and Jerry had traveled to Yazoo City to hear.

A Town in Turmoil

The Colomb-Davis saga began in 1981 when James Colomb signed up for an FHA mortgage on a brick three-bedroom home on the south end of Church Point, Louisiana. James was vaguely aware that the home was located in an all-white neighborhood, but the television news led him to believe that racial attitudes in America had shifted radically in recent years.

In one sense James was right. The Federal Housing Administration’s 1939 Underwriting Manual cited the threat of "inharmonious racial groups" and stipulated that "if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes."

But the civil rights movement of the 1960s marked a profound shift in philosophy. Four years before the Colombs purchased their home on the south end of Church Point the Community Reinvestment Act mandated that lending institutions actively encourage applications from low-income clients.

If James and Ann Colomb believed a new day of racial harmony was dawning in Church Point, Louisiana they were tragically wrong. In 1981 the sleepy little town was perfectly and (from the white perspective) happily segregated. The black population (roughly 30% of Acadia Parish) had its own Catholic Church, its own park, its own neighborhood—it even had its own Mardi Gras parade. Who could ask for anything more?

Black residents saw things a bit differently. Compared to the shacks in north Church Point, the Colomb’s three-bedroom FHA dwelling looked mighty inviting and it wasn’t long before other black families were following where James and Ann Colomb had led. Thanks to white flight a once all-white neighborhood is now predominantly black. In the late 1980s when Sammy Davis, the eldest of Ann’s five children, started high school the demographic shift in south Church Point was just beginning to gather steam.

A stocky young man, Sammy quickly emerged as a stalwart of the football team. In his freshman year of high school he started dating a white girl. The white community was horrified and the girl’s parents threatened to disown her. Throughout the South, the legislative revolution that allowed James Colomb to purchase an FHA home on the white end of town was resented as a Yankee intrusion. Most white residents of Church Point believed that integrated communities and inter-racial dating were sins against God; as such they could not be countenanced.

It wasn’t long before Sammy Davis’s brothers, Edward, Danny and Randy, had white girlfriends of their own. The local Ku Klux Klan responded with a barrage of threatening (and anonymous) phone calls. “You better tell that son of yours to quit messing with our girls or you’re gonna find him hanging from a tree,” the callers would say.

“Well, you better make sure there’s another stout limb on that tree,” Ann would respond, “’Cause I’m gonna find out who you are, I’m gonna hunt you down, and I’m gonna string you up right beside my son.”

The bold façade masked a growing sense of alarm. As the violence and frequency of the hate calls increased Ann and James had their phone disconnected.

Within the youth culture, meanwhile, the strict segregation that had long characterized Church Point society was rapidly disintegrating. The sense of alarm deepened when Edward Colomb began attracting the attention of college basketball scouts and his younger brother Danny showed early promise as a fullback. Star athletes are prime dating material and Ann Colomb’s boys were no exception to the rule.

For generations, “the Boulevard” (an oblong drag bordered at one end by the white Catholic church) had been the social centre of high school life. If you grew up in a small town you know the drill—kids circle the block in their cars looking for friends and dating prospects. Cans of beer are passed around and the local cops look the other way because they had been socialized into the same practices a few years earlier. Black people knew better than to show up on the Boulevard . . . until the Colomb boys hit high school. The thought of an integrated Boulevard sent shock waves through the white community.

As a tumultuous 1992 gave way to 1993, the racial tension in tiny little Church Point, Louisiana was palpable. Something had to give.

The Booty Wooty Profile

Tulia, Texas was my introduction to the criminal justice system. The people in the churches I served didn't get indicted; or if they did they didn't tell me about it.

The Beans pulled into Tulia just as Sheriff Larry Stewart was arresting Tom Coleman on theft charges. A year later so many people had been arrested on Mr. Coleman's word that the Swisher County jail had to contract with lockups within a fifty mile radius to make room for all the black bodies.

The Coleman sting became a cause celebre in the local media. Mike Garrett, editor of the now defunct Tulia Sentinel, could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “The fact that our sting operation made big front-page headlines in the Amarillo Globe-News and on the Amarillo TV stations will hopefully show other Panhandle communities that we don’t like these scumbags doing business in our town. Now it’s up to the courts to vigorously prosecute the traffickers to the point where we won’t see them back on our streets for another 5 to 20 years if at all.”

“One of the local newspapers called the drug sting defendants “scumbags” this week," I told my Baptist Sunday school class a few days later. "I don't know any of these people, but shouldn't they be presumed innocent until they get their day in court?”

“Scumbags is exactly what they are,” a middle-aged man across the table from me growled. Molten rectitude smoldered in his eyes and his mouth was twisted in rage.

“It’s these athletes that really get me riled,” a local businessman confided privately when the class was over. “We play them up like they’re some kinda heroes just ‘cause they win a few football and basketball games, and they reckon they can get away with anything. Smoking dope, selling drugs to our kids, taking advantage of our girls—anything! You try to do everything you can for these people to help them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and they always disappoint you.”

Four months later Joe (Booty Wooty) Moore was sentenced to 90 years on Tom Coleman's uncorroborated word. Tulia's black community assured me that Moore had never "messed" with Larry Stewart's undercover man and I believed them. But if Joe Moore could get a virtual life sentence on the basis of Coleman-plus-nothing, one pointed finger could convict anybody.

Experience forced me to amend my thesis slightly. If you fit the Booty Wooty profile (poor, uneducated, black or brown) the state of Texas can get a conviction without real evidence of guilt. This realization turned a Baptist preacher into a carping activist.

The media treats Tulia like a vestige of America's Jim Crow past. But the problem isn't just Tulia and it isn't just Texas; move to the federal system and the horror stories proliferate. For the past two years I have been working with Ann Colomb and her family in Church Point, Louisiana. While Scott Henson rests from his prodigious labors I will tell you how these United States transformed an innocent mother of five into Tony Soprano.

Louisiana case shows why informant testimony should be vetted before trial

It's nice to occasionally hear some good news on the criminal justice front:

Grits' friend Rev. Alan Bean of Tulia Friends of Justice reports on that group's website about the granting of a new trial by a federal judge in a high profile Louisiana drug case based largely on mendacious informant testimony. The judge declared he simply didn't believe shifting statements from the government's jailhouse snitch: "'I have not seen a person come up here and take the oath . . .' the Judge began, then took another run at it. 'He was the most uncredible witness I have seen in thirty years on the bench. This is an abomination.'" (See the local press coverage.)

An "abomination," and yet, prosecutors had been able to obtain a jury verdict of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt."

As Prof. Natapoff suggests, there need to be ways for judges to evaluate informant testimony BEFORE it's heard by a jury. Based on a witness that shaky, this case never should have gotten this far. Great work, Alan, on the coverage.

Texas' high imprisonment rate a stain on the national character

Doc Berman at the inestimable Sentencing Law and Policy blog brings news via Andrew Sullivan of a new report charting world incarceration rates: Unsurprisingly, the Land of the Free leads the pack. The United States incarcerates a far greater percentage of our population than any other country, reports the Sixth Annual World Prison Population List (pdf), imprisoning 714 adult residents per 100,000 nationwide, while 3/5 of nations incarcerated less than 150 per 100,000.

All I can say is, "714"? Pshaw!

Welcome to Texas, baby. Last I saw we rock out here at 1,035 per 100,000. Nothing says "we love freedom" like locking up one out of every hundred adults. Andrew Sullivan picked up on that, too: "Texas, by the way, has an imprisonment rate of well over 1,000," he wrote on his blog. "There's no country on the planet - no dictatorship on earth - as comfortable with locking people up as the state of Texas."

He's got a point. Including those on probation and parole, the Justice Policy Institute calculated that one in 20 Texans at any one time are under control of the criminal justice system! Take that, Belarus! And what'd we get for it? According to JPI, "Despite adding more than 100,000 prisoners this decade [1990 to 2000], Texas' crime rate has declined more slowly than other large states."

Of course, my friends in Louisiana would hasten to add that the Bayou State has since surpassed Texas in the ignominious category of who imprisons the highest percentage of its citizens, especially after of bunch of their people left the state last year, reducing the denominator further in the prisoner-to-population calculation. Mississippi is always right up there at the top of the pack, too. While obviously a lot of factors are at play, it's funny how it's the three states in the Fifth Circuit leading the incarceration brigade. But whatever the cause, the fact remains the southern gulf states are driving the incarceration train in America, which means we're driving the incarceration train for the whole world.

This is a 20th century phenomenon I think the US founding fathers would have abhorred. Two major categories of modern "crime," immigration and drug prohibition, weren't even against the law the nation's first 130 years or so. (Immigration was first restricted in 1918, drug prohibition rose up in the '20s). Today, immigration cases make up the largest portion of federal prosecutors' workload, followed by prosecuting the drug war. In the states, drug prosecutions still lead the way. Those aren't the only sources, though of what's been referred to on the right as "overcriminalization." In Texas, nearly 2,000 separate acts have been declared felonies by the Legislature - when God laid down the law in Exodus, by contrast, He could only come up with ten.

These numbers are an embarrassment, a stain on the national character. How can a republic founded to establish freedom from tyranny lock up more of its people than any other? Somewhere along the way, we must have lost our path.

Crooked task force commander steals drugs from HQ in crawfish country

Further evidence that drug task force scandals aren't just a Texas problem:

A drug task force commander in Plaquemine, Louisiana was arrested last month for allegedly breaking into the task force headquarters to steal cocaine and attempting to burn the building to the ground. This is another drug task force financed by the federal Byrne grant program, which the Bush Administration wants to abolish. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Lt. Gerald Jenkins, task force commander and a 20-year sheriff's deputy, was booked with malfeasance in office, obstruction of justice, burglary, theft, attempted arson, attempted arson with intent to defraud, possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and placing combustible material in a structure. ...

Iberville Parish Sheriff Brent Allain and Plaquemine Police Chief Orian Gulotta reported that early Monday morning, LEAD Task Force headquarters was broken into. Cash, narcotics and a gun had been stolen, and an attempt had been made to set the building on fire.

The burglary was discovered about 4 a.m. Investigation revealed that entry had been gained through a window. Officers found that interior doors were broken into, a large amount of gasoline had been poured throughout the offices, and several items had been stolen or vandalized.

Jenkins was arrested along with a cousin, who is a previously convicted felon.