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Texas Justice
By Junious Ricardo Stanton "This year Dallas residents
learned that their police department had been convicting and
deporting people for cocaine sales that had never happened. What
made the cases particularly bizarre was the police didn't even
bother to plant actual cocaine, the arrests were made on the
basis of planted sheetrock powder. Now sheetrock made from
mineral gypsum powder and the organic chemical cocaine don't
bear much chemical similarity to each other... so the Dallas DA
office simply maintained a policy of not having the sheetrock
"cocaine" tested by the county forensic lab unless
cases went to court. To avoid trials, plea bargains were foisted
upon the mostly working class and small business owner Mexican
immigrant victims who were naturally in a state of shock after
being arrested for 'crimes' that never happened."-Bill
Walker http://www.aci.net/kelliste
While perusing a list of links on current
events I decided to check one out. Going to the site, I selected
an article about a police narcotics unit drug scam in Dallas
Texas. The article chronicled how once Dallas police made an
arrest the District Attorney's office never sent the confiscated
"cocaine" to a forensics lab for testing. In almost
all of the cases, the working class and small merchant Mexican
immigrants plea bargained for lesser sentences or deportation
because they feared they would be sent to jail for long
sentences even though they were innocent of any wrong doing. But
in the eighteen cases where defense lawyers demanded testing, it
turned out to be powdered gypsum the material used in sheetrock!
As a result over forty cases were dismissed.
The tragedy is that many innocent Mexicans
were deported and their property confiscated. Reading about that
case, I immediately reviewed and compared it to the scandal in
Tulia Texas where forty African-Americans were arrested and
charged with being part of a cocaine drug ring only to discover
a white undercover officer, Tom Coleman, (who fled prosecution
on theft charges on a previous job as a law enforcement
official) was the sole witness in the arrests. In the Tulia
cases the undercover police officer worked alone and provided no
collaborating backup audio or visual evidence beyond his word
against the people he arrested which resulted in convictions and
lengthy jail sentences for many first time offenders.
Another article mentioned a case in Hearne
Texas where state prosecutors were forced to dismiss charges on
seventeen residents, all African-Americans, who were arrested on
the testimony of a police informant who later failed a polygraph
test on the issue of tampering with the evidence. In still
another case in San Antonio eight police officers were arrested
and charged with protecting cocaine shipments into and around
the city. Is there a nefarious plot going on here? Texas
has historically been an oppressive place for people of color.
The horror stories of their chain gangs and prison abuses are
legendary (although no worse than some other places).
Keep in mind that current white house
resident George W. Bush was the governor of Texas where he
gleefully ordered the execution of over thirty inmates. This
from a man who professes to be a "born again
Christian". I suspect if he were called on it he would just
say "I was following the law." It never occurred to
Dubeyah to take the bold step like the governor of Illinois and
order a moratorium on capital punishment. Back to the drug
arrests, the alarming common threads in all these cases are:
people of color (African-Americans and Mexicans) were the
targets of these arrests and the collaborative malfeasance of
the police and prosecutors.
This is another example of how the law has
been used to destabilize our community through profiling and
stigmatization of people of color as drug dealers, and through
incarcerating huge numbers of our people, often on bogus charges
by over zealous or racist police-prosecutorial tandems. Nation
wide, black and brown folks are being arrested using the so
called War on Drugs as a tool to incarcerate and ruin the lives
of countless little people while someone like the daughter of
Jeb Bush is repeatedly given breaks.
Prison construction is at an all time high.
AmeriKKKa now warehouses over two million of its mostly black
and brown residents. Couple this with the moves of states like
Florida to disenfranchise convicted felons it becomes a triple
whammy. Not only does it place more black folks in jail, it
reduces the available jury pool and the voter rolls! The most
revealing aspects of all of this is that the lawmakers aren't
stupid, they know what's wrong, in many instances they are loath
to correct it.
POSITIVELY BLACK Junious Ricardo Stanton jrswriter@comcast.net
posted 30 July 2002 |
