Houston Lawyer Chapter Hosts "Tulia" Panel on 2/13/06

admin — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 11:37:11 -0500

On Feburary 13, 2006, the Houston Lawyer Chapter of ACS hosted a lunch and panel discussion regarding the notorious Tulia Texas “drug stings” that rounded up 46 people, forty of whom were African Americans. Nearly one in two of Tulia's black males were arrested, about 15% of the town's black population. All of this was based on the uncorroborated testimony of an undercover agent.

Members of the panel were: Jeff Blackburn of Amarillo, Texas, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer who represented many of the defendants in Tulia. In 2000, he organized the Tulia Legal Defense Project, a pro bono group of area lawyers and legal assistants devoted to overturning the Tulia drug convictions, which they eventually did; Will Harrell, Executive Director, ACLU of Texas. The ACLU worked for a series of remedial acts for the Tulia defendants and reforms in criminal jurisprudence in Texas which resulted in the so-called “Tulia bills”; and Nate Blakeslee, an editor for the Texas Observer and author of Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town. His articles in The Texas Observer, and later his book, focused attention on the Tulia abuses and are credited with exposing a corrupt group of law enforcement officials, a rogue, undercover narcotics cop, and finally providing delayed justice of the victims.

Houston Lawyer Chapter