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17 April 2009
| Article Index |
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| American Violet: The true story of Regina Kelly |
| Page 2 |
| All Pages |
The Hearne bust featured Derrick Megress, a hapless crack addict who was threatened with jail time and prison rape if he refused to implicate twenty residents of a Hearne housing project. Although Megress allegedly taped the drug deals he claimed to be making out of his living room, the tape quality was indecipherable. And that for a very good reason: Megress later confessed that he had faked every single case in order to get the authorities off his back.
The Hearne victims reached out to the Texas ACLU just as the then-struggling organization was regaining its vigor. Will Harrell (now Ombudsman for the Texas Youth Commission) had just signed on as Executive Director and, at Harrell’s behest, a guitar-playing lawyer named Jeff Frazier was scouring the state for drug war horror stories. The New York Times had just run a successful story on Tulia and when Frazier tipped them off to the Hearne debacle the Gray Lady decided to take a chance.
Eventually, the ACLU’s Drug Policy Reform Project filed a civil suit on behalf of Regina Kelly. A series of townhall meetings were held in a local church and, if the clip below is anything to go by, these meetings figure prominently in American Violet. I was on hand for most of these gatherings, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of one of the Tulia defendants.
During the 2001 legislative session, the ACLU (led by Kathy Mitchell and Scott “Grits” Henson) cobbled together a series of Hearne-Tulia bills designed to discourage a repeat of Heare-Tulia drug war overreach. Eventually, thanks to some last-minute heroics from Will Herrell, a bill was passed calling for the corroboration of uncorroborated confidential informant testimony.
That bill, incidentally, allowed Cynthia Barbare, a hardworking Dallas attorney, to prove that the drugs the Dallas DA’s office was using to prosecute her client were nothing but powdered sheetrock.
Tulia, Hearne and the Dallas Sheetroock scandal became the left-right-left combination that changed the rules of the drug war in the great state of Texas.
