A total of 47 individuals,[a] the majority of whom were African American, were arrested in 1999 in Tulia, Texas on charges of cocaine dealing as a result of an undercover operation carried out by agent Tom Coleman.
[3] The first draft of the congressional bill was written by then-Senator Joe Biden of Delaware in cooperation with the National Association of Police Organizations and was sponsored by U.S. Representative Jack Brooks of Texas.
[6] In Tulia and small towns alike, task forces received funding for each arrest and conviction they made, which could be used as they pleased the following year.
[7] Using the alias T. J. Dawson, Agent Tom Coleman went undercover for 18 months, posing as a buyer who needed to purchase cocaine for his girlfriend.
[9] On the morning of July 23, 1999, the Swisher County Sheriff's Department, in cooperation with local authorities, conducted a collective apprehension and arrest of 47 citizens in Tulia, Texas.
[16] Sparked by a letter written by Gary Gardner, who was distraught by the lack of evidence, to District Judge Ed Self,[17] Amarillo civil rights attorney Jeff Blackburn began investigating the Tulia defendants' cases, along with Vanita Gupta from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a handful of attorneys from firms around the country.
[1] In 2003, the state appointed two prosecutors to hold evidentiary hearings to determine if Coleman's testimony was the sole basis for conviction, and to find out if county officials withheld information from the defense.
[18] On Friday, January 14, 2005, Coleman was convicted of perjury in the separate evidentiary hearing trial, not related to the original 47 defendants that he testified against.
Starting in 2002, Bob Herbert, a journalist for The New York Times, wrote eleven op-ed articles that played a significant role in spreading the Tulia story across the United States.
[29][30] The book Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town by Nate Blakeslee was to be adapted into a film directed by John Singleton starring Billy Bob Thornton.