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"YOU would send them to prison, not Coleman."

It wouldn't have been my fault. I didn't represent any of these people. It wouldn't have been the fault of their attorneys either. No one has to plead guilty. And the attorneys wouldn't have been wrong to tell them that the jury was liable to believe a white man with a badge over them. Tulia is mostly white, and the juries that were to decide these cases that pled may very well have been all white.

I don't live in Tulia. But I do work in a southern town that is mostly white. I had a jury trial Friday and every single person on the jury pool we had to select from was white. It often works that way, or we'll have a couple of people black people in the pool and because of the luck of the draw when they draw names to see who will sit for voir dire, often none of the black people end up in the group left for us to choose from. Our juries tend to be all white, made up mostly of silver haired white Southern Baptists. That's just how it works out.

And there is prejudice in most parts of the south, more than what you see in most other parts of the country. The Ku Klux Klan is alive and well where I live. The people in the Klan around here are not skin head types, those types are in different white supremacist groups. The Klan around here is made up of people who are pillars of society, deacons in the church, otherwise solid citizens who vote and who are sometimes called for jury duty. Obviously relatively few citizens are actually members of the Klan or other white supremacist groups, but prejudice is common and nothing people really even try to hide around here, unless they are going through something like voir dire. Prospective jurors almost never admit their racial prejudices in open court, even though we all know these people are a cross section of the community and many are going to harbor the same prejudices common throughout the community.

You know just last week I got an official notice in the mail signed by the county Judge saying that the courthouse would be closed Monday for "Robert E. Lee/Martin Luther King day." It was typed just like that and now the same notice is posted on all of the courthouse doors. No one will say a word about it. No one around here even cares. Nobody celebrates Martin Luther Kind day around here. People just chuckle and wish each other a happy Robert E. Lee day. I imagine that in most parts of the country there would be a big stink if the county Judge did up an official notice that the courthouse would be closed for Robert E. Lee day and posted on all the courthouse doors for all to see. Things are different in most parts of the south.

You know we read in the newspaper and see on the TV all the time stories about people who are found not guilty by juries. A lot of times it looks like some of these people were guilty and they got away with it. It makes it look like this sort of thing happens a high percentage of the time. The fact of the matter though is that nationwide only about 2% of all felony cases ever make it to trial. Almost all criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain and in almost every case that doesn't make it to trial people end up pleading guilty or no contest. And of those cases that do make it to trial, very few of the defendants are acquitted of all charges. Most of the time they are going to be found guilty.

Now, most people accused of crimes are guilty of at least some of what they are accused of doing (not all though). That's just the reality of it. And the reality is that jurors know that most people are guilty and even though they are supposed to presume that a defendant is innocent until they deliberate and find otherwise, it's hard for most to really stick to the presumption of innocence. In real life most go into the courtroom expecting that the guy on trial is probably guilty. I know this as a defense attorney and I know that even though technically the defendant doesn't have to prove anything, we're going to somehow have to prove the defendant is innocent or at least poke enough huge holes in the prosecutor's case that we make some of the jurors have some serious doubts about the State's case, serious enough to overcome their expectation that the defendant is guilty. It's an uphill battle for us. The deck is stacked against us because in real life we have to take this jury that believes our client is probably guilty and not only do we have to poke holes in the prosecutor's case but we have to somehow overcome this normal prejudice people have against someone who is accused of committing a crime.

Drug cases are particularly hard to try because the witnesses are often police officers. Jurors are far more likely to believe a guy with a badge than someone accused of committing a crime. They expect the guy accused of committing a drug crime to lie, while at the same time they expect the guy with the badge to tell the truth. Police officers are highly trained witnesses who usually know exactly what to say to win their cases and exactly what not to say that might hurt their cases. It's hard to nail most of these guys down and catch them in a lie when they are lying. And trying to bust out police officers is something that tends to make jurors roll their eyes and shake their heads in disgust. They believe the police and when we try to make them look like liars most of the time we are going to irk the jury even if the guy really is lying unless we can really nail him down and show that there is some substance to what we are saying and not just a lot of mud being slung. But watch their body language when the other side goes after the defendant or his witnesses and you'll see that most of the time jurors eat it up when prosecutors attack these people. The mud sticks and it's hard to impossible to wash off. Juries naturally tend to feel like prosecutors and cops are on their side, criminal defendants and their attorneys are at their mercy.

What's going on behind the scenes is that prosecutors and police are working as a team trying to get convictions in all their cases and hand out the highest level of punishment they can hand out. Defense attorneys are trying to get cases dropped and sometimes get not guilty verdicts, but not guilty verdicts only come in a tiny percentage of all the cases so most of the time what the defense attorney is trying to do is minimize the damage to his clients. The prosecutors are going to make offers with a "plea discount." They have an idea of what will happen to a person at trial and they try to make offers that punish the defendant as much as possible while still being lower than what the person is likely to get if the case goes to trial. They want almost all of them to plead because there would never be nearly enough time, money, or resources to try anywhere close to all of them. So they try to posture and bluff their way into getting a defendant to accept as harsh an offer as possible without forcing his hand and leaving him no choice but to go to trial.

For prosecutors and defense attorney as well often it's not about doing what's right, it's about winning the game. The prosecutors are rarely considering the possibility that the guy might be innocent. They don't even want to entertain notions like that, they have a war to fight. They are trying win, and winning means getting convictions and working it out such that the defendants get punished as much as possible. For the defense attorney winning is working out a deal with lower than usual punishment, or even just beating the offer at trial. We've really done something if we take a case to trial and get a not guilty verdict but that happens so infrequently most of the time we have to be happy with getting our clients good deals or beating the offer at trial.

Unfortunately, justice and fairness are too often way low on the list of things to be considered in this game. It's a competition between the two sides, an all out war. There are certainly cases where defense attorneys lie and use less than savory tactics. There are also instances where police and prosecutors lie, hide exculpatory evidence, threaten and coerce witnesses, and just generally not play fair. And judges often know this is going on but do nothing about it because like everyone else most of them believe that most of these people are guilty anyway and they want to see the prosecutors win their cases and nail people accused of criminal conduct to the wall. There's sort of an "all's fair in love and war" attitude that prevails. And even good people get caught up in it. Even good cops and prosecutors will sometimes twist things, cover up evidence contrary to the case they'll put on, and if not lie than certainly embellish. Bad cops and prosecutors will do a lot worse to ensure that they'll win.

I've gone over this at length because I want you and anyone else who might be reading this to have a better understanding of what goes on in our system. It's easy to lose sight of one of the main purposes of our system and that is to see that justice be done. One thing fundamental in the notion of justice that has developed in the western world is this belief that it is better for guilty people to go unpunished than it is for an innocent person to be wrongfully convicted. Some legal scholars and philosophers have said it is better for a hundred guilty men to go unpunished than one innocent man should suffer, and others have said it's better that ten guilty people go unpunished than one innocent man be wrongfully convicted. Most seem to think that it's far worse for innocent people to be wrongfully convicted than it is for guilty people to go unpunished. I tend to agree with this line of thinking.

Of course there are cases that can really put ones faith in this principle to a test, such as a case where a serial rapist or someone like that gets off, but in most cases we shouldn't have a hard time adhering to this principle. For instance, in drug cases if a guilty guy gets away with it today there will probably be a next time and he'll probably get his in the end. And the fact is that even if he hadn't have lucked out this time it wouldn't have put a dent in the drug supply if he had have gone to prison because there are plenty others out there willing and able to supply the local demand for drugs. In cases like that especially there is no excuse for us not to strive to see that innocent people are not wrongfully convicted even at the expense of occasionally letting a guilty man walk.

The reality is though that this is a competition where the prosecutor and the police who are on his team are fighting to win convictions, sometimes at any cost. And in these cases more than most others the deck is stacked in their favor even more than in other cases because the witnesses are mostly cops, trained witnesses on the prosecutors' team, who are naturally far more credible witnesses in the eyes of the jury, whether they are honest in reality or not. These are some of the easiest cases for prosecutors to get convictions in and in most cases they're going to be able to get the judge or jury to mete out harsh penalties to those convicted. That's just the way it is and the harsh penalties are a fact of life down here in the bible belt, and unfortunately white juries tend to punish black defendants much harder than white defendants down here.

In the Tulia cases there was no other evidence except for Coleman's testimony. There were no drugs presented as evidence. There were no audio or video tapes. There was no corroborating testimony. Juries convicted these people based on nothing more than Coleman's testimony. And it turns out that some of the people he accused had rock solid alibis proving that they were somewhere else when the alleged transactions occurred. Did any of the eleven who went to trial have alibis? Maybe, but they obviously didn't have solid proof of them that they could present at trial. If this guy was wrong about some of these cases and that has been proven, how many others has he been wrong on? How many pled guilty for lesser sentences rather than face him and his badge at trial? I couldn't help but notice that a much higher than average percentage of these cases actually went to trial compared to the 2% or so that generally make it to trial. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many of those who pled almost took their cases to trial but in the end opted for the safer bet of taking a plea with a lesser penalty rather than face the possibility of spending a huge chunk of their lives behind bars.

You are probably more familiar with this particular case than I am. But I know how things tend to work often times in these cases. I also find it very hard to believe that the 6 million dollars was paid out for nothing. This guy probably lied on the stand about some of these people who were convicted. The only reason he wasn't prosecuted in criminal court is because the statute of limitation barred prosecution. This sort of thing is not just a betrayal of those convicted, who may well have been scumbags, but it is a betrayal of all of this society that values fairness and justice. It's a kind of insidious cheating that cannot be tolerated in this society or more and more innocent people will be wrongfully punished. If he lied and because of it caused anyone to be convicted of something they did not do. He has committed a far worse crime against society than selling drugs to adults who want them. Those with badges who abuse the respect they are given in society by lying and putting innocent people in prison are more of a threat to you and me and everyone else than some druggie who sells drugs to other druggies. And in my mind they should be punished far more harshly for their crimes against society and the individuals they harm by their actions.