Texas Attorney General Opens an Inquiry Into '99 Drug Sweep: Attorney General John Cornyn of Texas has opened an investigation into a 1999 drug sweep in which about 12 percent of the black population of Tulia, Tex., was arrested. The decision failed to appease civil rights lawyers, who describe the arrests in an undercover operation as atrocities and want the convictions overturned. Mr. Cornyn, who announced the investigation on Monday, suggested that he had opened the inquiry partly because of confusion that had arisen this month about whether the United States Justice Department was continuing its own civil rights investigation of more than two years. (NY Times, registration required.)

... It took Texas two years to decide to look into whether or not state laws may have been violated in a bust that arrested more than 10% of the blacks in one town, carried out on the word of a man that the sheriff's office had been warned not to hire by his previous employers, and who has subsequently been determined to have been lying in several of those cases.

Yes. Quite.

Cornyn had previously refused to order an examination of the 1999 sting operation in Tulia, a town of 5,000, in which more than 10 percent of the town's black population was arrested. Fourteen are serving prison sentences of up to 90 years. In reversing his position, Cornyn, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by the retirement of Sen. Phil Gramm (R), said a "slow-moving" federal investigation had failed to determine whether state laws had been broken.

I would point out that a federal investigation is not supposed to determine whether or not state laws have been broken. That is, understandably enough, the responsibility of the state.

Purely in political terms, I don't understand why the man would risk raising the issue at this point in time. Even if the federal government had dropped its investigation -- which it may not actually have done -- since the opponent hadn't raised the issue, why on earth would you want to remind voters of your two years of inactivity on what is manifestly a miscarriage of justice? There is absolutely no light in which taking this path makes political sense. And if justice was the issue -- as one would hope it would be for an attorney general, but that would be hoping for an awful lot -- then the investigation should have started ages ago.

For a right-winger, Cornyn can be a suprisingly decent guy sometimes. He's done the right thing in respect to racist death penalty testimony, which favorably impressed me. Maybe it's taken him this long to catch a clue about how bad the Tulia investigation was.

On the other hand, he's running for the Senate seat and he may be looking at fundraising problems or something now that the story has gone national. Or maybe Governor Goodhair got on his case about how bad it looks.

The only thing that I can see that could have inspired a change of heart now is recent national coverage of the case. So I'm inclined to attribute the investigation to that rather than a change of heart.