Texas lawyer exonerated dozens, exposed Tulia drug bust
In the summer of 1999, police in the tiny town of Tulia carried out one of the largest drug stings in West Texas history. Nearly 50 people were arrested, almost all of them Black, and several were quickly sentenced to life in prison. “Tulia’s Streets Cleared of Garbage,” the local newspaper declared.
Convictions in the remaining cases seemed all but certain, even though they were riddled with inconsistencies.
None of the defendants had drugs on them when they were arrested, and the allegations against them hinged on the oftencontradictory testimony of a single undercover police officer. So in a lastditch effort, one of the defendants’ lawyers asked for help from a prominent young attorney in Amarillo named Jeff Blackburn.
Over the next four years, Blackburn exposed one of the country’s most celebrated drug busts as a sham. Together with a team of lawyers and activists, he helped prove that the undercover officer was a serial liar. He secured early releases for dozens of the defendants and even persuaded thenGov. Rick Perry to pardon them.
Blackburn’s work in Tulia helped set the stage for more than a decade of reforms to Texas’ criminal justice system — many of which are still considered the most transformational in the country. As founder of the Innocence Project of Texas, he helped exonerate dozens more people and, in the process, persuaded lawmakers to improve evidence requirements in criminal cases and increase compensation for the wrongfully convicted.
On Tuesday, the man once called the “troublemakingest lawyer in West Texas” died of kidney cancer at age 65. In a series of recent interviews with the Houston Chronicle, Blackburn reflected on the changes that he helped bring about and
insisted that the work was bigger than any one person.
“I really dislike the notion of people going, ‘Here was this extraordinary guy or person, and that’s how things happened,’” he said from his home near Taos, N.M., where he lived out his final days with friends and family. “I’m an ordinary lawyer.”
Any other conclusion, Blackburn said, is “essentially discouraging regular people to take up the cause.”
‘I was wiped out’
Blackburn knew he would have to get creative to make a difference in Tulia. Overturning convictions was notoriously difficult in Texas’ appellate courts. But for a headstrong, charismatic attorney who cheekily displayed a bust of Lenin in his law office in one of the most politically conservative areas of the country, the challenge was irresistible.
He filed a civil lawsuit against the authorities involved in the drug sting, hoping to learn as much as he could about the circumstances behind the investigation. He also helped persuade the Texas Observer to write about it.
“Everybody told me he was a character,” said then-Observer reporter Nate Blakeslee, who recalled that Blackburn “smoked like a chimney” and went on about Marxist political theory during their first meeting in Amarillo. “I have to say, he was like nobody I’d ever met in that part of the state.”
Blakeslee’s story brought national attention to the absurdities of the Tulia sting, like the fact that there were no video or audio recordings of the supposed drug buys. The undercover officer, Tom Coleman, said it was too dangerous to wear a wire, so instead he wrote the names of suspects and other important details on his leg. Coleman had himself been arrested for an unrelated theft during the course of his investigation — details that a judge ruled weren’t relevant enough for juries to hear.
Weeks after Blakelee’s story was published,
Tulia defendant Kareem White went to trial. On the witness stand, Coleman said he would drive 50 miles to Amarillo after each drug transaction in order to submit the evidence. But on the day he’d claimed to buy cocaine from White at 10:35 a.m., he’d also reported another buy from a different defendant at 9:30 a.m.
He wouldn’t have been able to make the trip in time. After deliberating for just 90 minutes, jurors convicted White anyway and handed him a 60-year prison sentence. He was 23.
The outcome was both gutting and predictable. As Blackburn would tell young lawyers throughout his career, “If you do this job right, if you put your heart into it, expect your heart to be broken over and over.”
A few months later, he faced another, more personal tragedy. Blackburn had only recently married Irina, his fifth wife, who struggled with mental illness. In April 2001, she killed herself.
“I was wiped out,” Blackburn recalled. “Devastated. I really felt like I was at some crossroads I couldn’t get out of.”
Despondent, he went to see a psychiatrist, who told him he needed to scale back the conflict in his life and abandon the Tulia effort.
Blackburn was defiant. “Are you kidding me?” he remembered thinking. “I’m in the conflict business … this is who I am.”
Rather than pull back, Blackburn threw himself into Tulia even more. He scaled back the rest of his law practice, borrowed tens of thousands of dollars from his grandmother and immersed himself in the theories of strategic thinking, obtaining more than a dozen translations of the book “The Art of War.”
Blackburn also began working more closely with Austin-based criminal justice reform activist Scott Henson, who was arranging for families of the jailed Tulia defendants to travel to the Texas Capitol and push for policy changes.
By mid-2001, spurred by the events in Tulia, lawmakers from both parties overwhelmingly approved a new bill requiring corroboration of all informant testimony to secure a drug conviction. The law’s passage prompted prosecutors across the state to dismiss nearly 800 criminal cases.
“Jeff and I were kindred spirits,” said Henson. “We both understood that the other side won because as you got into a prolonged fight, they would just wear you out. Jeff and I both just hung around out of spite.”
There was still more work to do, however. Twenty Tulia defendants remained in jail, and two others had yet to go to trial. One of them was Kareem’s relative, Tonya White.
A smoking gun
The evidence against Tonya was just as flimsy as in the other cases. But she also had an intriguing alibi: She was living in Oklahoma City when Coleman alleged that she sold him 4 grams of cocaine in Tulia. She was indicted as part of the drug sting in 1999, but had so far evaded arrest because she had been living outside Texas.
Blackburn persuaded her to turn herself in, offering to represent her for free. If they could prove her alibi, he reasoned, that might gain enough political and media momentum to persuade Perry to pardon the remaining defendants.
In 2002, Blackburn found the “smoking gun” he was looking for: a workers’ compensation check that Tonya White had cashed in person at an Oklahoma City bank on the same day that Coleman alleged to have bought drugs from her in 1998. Prosecutors promptly dismissed the case.
“I trusted him, believed in him, and everything he said was true,” said
White, who now lives in Tulia with her 12-year-old daughter and is attending nursing school.
By the time White’s charges were dismissed, a team of lawyers from Washington, D.C., had joined the effort, leading a push to overturn some of the Tulia convictions in the appellate courts. Blackburn got to know Perry, a Republican and fellow West Texan, reasoning that pardons might be the fastest way to get the rest of the defendants out of jail.
The friendship that developed between the two baffled many of his colleagues. To close friends, though, it was classic Blackburn.
“This is not somebody Jeff would have anything in common with politically,” said Houston-based attorney Robb Fickman, who has known Blackburn since the two were law school roommates in the early 1980s. “But he has a smooth enough personality that he can talk to anybody, really. He can be as chameleon-like as need be.”
In 2003, during a bombshell post-conviction court hearing, Coleman’s checkered past became too difficult to ignore. A former supervisor testified that he had been so concerned about Coleman’s performance that he wrote to the state licensing agency for peace officers. The local sheriff in Tulia acknowledged that he’d arrested Coleman for theft after hiring him to work on the drug sting — and that he’d concealed the arrest from the state and also claimed not to know about it during previous trials.
A judge soon declared Coleman to be “the most devious, non-responsive law enforcement witness this court has witnessed in 25 years on the bench in Texas.”
In August, Perry pardoned 38 of the Tulia defendants. Eventually, Texas abolished all of its federally-funded drug task forces, which had collectively made over 12,000 arrests a year.
Going statewide
Blackburn had never dreamed he could contribute to such massive change. Even then, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Tulia was not as exceptional as it seemed. He believed thousands of people across Texas were behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. He wanted to use what he learned in Tulia to go statewide.
Blackburn founded the Innocence Project of Texas in 2006. It soon helped free more than a dozen people wrongfully accused of rape in Dallas by testing DNA evidence.
Blackburn also won successful judgments for many clients in civil court, and plowed most of the fees he earned back into the Innocence Project. He hired Henson as his policy director in 2008 and won individual exonerations that helped change state policies on everything from arson investigations to the use of dog scent evidence.
“He did a hell of a lot to strengthen the evidentiary standards for witness identification, DNA, interrogation — you can just go down the list,” said Rodney Ellis, who worked closely with Blackburn while he was a state senator. Ellis is now a Harris County commissioner.
In one of his most celebrated cases after Tulia, Blackburn secured the posthumous exoneration of Tim Cole, who’d died in prison while serving a 25-year sentence for a rape he didn’t commit on the campus of Texas Tech University. The university later put up a statue in Cole’s honor, and the Legislature increased the compensation for the wrongfully convicted to $80,000 per year spent in prison –— which remains among the highest in the nation.
But by 2014, the politics of the state, and the country, were rapidly shifting. Republicans, including newly elected Gov. Greg Abbott, were taking harder lines on crime. The fragile coalition between libertarians and Democrats that had pushed criminal justice reforms through the Legislature dissolved.
Meanwhile, Blackburn and other reform advocates were clashing over how best to bring about further change.
“He’s truly — and I don’t say it lightly — he’s one of the most principled people I ever met. To the point where some people find him extraordinarily difficult to work with,” said Fickman, the Houston attorney. “Bridges that (he) burned, in my opinion, typically needed to be burned.”
Blackburn became increasingly uncomfortable with the level of celebrity that the work awarded him and his colleagues. He felt caught between two worlds — the one he’d grown up in, despising all forms of authority, and the massive institution he was now a part of.
In 2015, he quit. “What was once a movement has now become a business,” he wrote in a public resignation letter.
Relentless to the end
For Blackburn, leaving the Innocence Project did not mean scaling back his activism. He soon began what would be a yearslong, and ultimately successful, crusade to bring a public defender’s office to Amarillo. He also continued to take criminal cases, helping free a woman who spent a year in jail for a murder that her exhusband had committed. He later hired her as his paralegal.
Blackburn eventually moved to El Prado, N.M., to pursue a budding interest in sustainable farming, along with his girlfriend, Jessy Tyler, and his son.
Last year, a doctor informed him that he had late-stage kidney cancer and the only way to fight it involved extensive surgeries and radiation treatment. He wasn’t having any of it, quipping to the doctor, “Does this mean I don’t have to floss anymore?”
“The sadness of his dying young, the way he’s embracing it, is all classic Jeff,” Fickman said. “He’s gonna do it his way.”
Even in his final weeks in El Prado, Blackburn didn’t stop working for change. He was on the phone with his law partner, Adam Tisdell, about encouraging another rural West Texas county to set up a public defender’s office. He also founded a new civil rights nonprofit based in New Mexico called the Rio Grande Regional Justice Project.
“There was never one minute of my career I did not love being a lawyer,” he said last month. “Everything that’s worthwhile comes from below, from ordinary people, including ordinary lawyers.”
“It’s a romantic view,” he continued. “And that’s all right. I don’t mind being a romantic till the day I die.”