April 13, 2006
Private: Too Close for Comfort: Operation Meth Merchant Begins to Look Like Tulia Redux
It's more than 1,100 miles from Tulia, Texas to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, but in the political geography of America's war on drugs the two cities are not so far apart as they might initially seem.
Tulia, of course, is the town that was torn apart in 1999 by a cocaine sting that landed 15% of the city's entire African-American population in prison. That sting began to unravel as soon as it began, as the informant whose allegations supported the arrests was revealed to be wildly unreliable and the evidence to support his claims wholly missing.
Fort Oglethorpe, on the other hand, was a city affected by a more recent variation on the Tulia model. It was one of the spots where dozens of South Asian convenience store clerks were arrested in early 2003 as part of "Operation Meth Merchant," a campaign to crack down on the sale of everyday products used in the manufacture of methamphetamine in Northwest Georgia. Of the 49 people arrested under the program, 44 were Indian immigrants. It was in Fort Oglethorpe that a woman named Malvika Patel and her husband, Chirag, were accused of selling potential meth ingredients - like matchbooks and cold medicine - to undercover government agents. But the charges against the pair were bogus: neither Malvika nor Chirag had even been in the city at the time when the sale allegedly took place. With overwhelming alibi evidence, the Patels and six other defendants have been able to get the charges against them dismissed. Many other defendants, however, are still being prosecuted under Operation Meth Merchant, and 23 have pled guilty. This despite evidence that these individuals in many cases lacked the English skills to understand the street slang that government agents were using to describe their meth "cooks."
Last week, (as this blog noted on Friday) the ACLU filed suit on behalf of the clerks arrested in Operation Meth Merchant. The suit alleges that law enforcement officials "ignored extensive evidence that white-owned stores were selling the same items to methamphetamine makers and focused instead on South Asians to take advantage of language barriers," according to the New York Times.
On its website, the ACLU notes that "almost 20 percent of the South-Asian-owned stores in the area were indicted," under Operation Meth Merchant, "while only 0.2 percent of stores owned by whites or other ethnic groups were similarly accused. All in all, South-Asian-owned stores were nearly 100 times more likely to be targeted."
David Nahmias, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia has denied allegations that race played a role in the prosecutions. He was paraphrased by the Associated Press last week as saying that "attorneys were assessing each case on its own merits." and quoted in February as saying "The United States Attorney's Office prosecutes cases based on the evidence and the law not the defendant's race, ethnicity, or last name." But that characterization is strongly disputed by blogs like the Racial Justice Campaign Against Operation Meth Merchant, which has emphasized what it calls the "viciousness of [the investigation's] focus on this small, marginalized community."
And the parallels to the Tulia debacle - from the use of blundering informants to the prosecutions based on mistaken identity to the massively disproportionate racial impacts - are proving increasingly difficult to ignore. As the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund has noted, Operation Meth Merchant has experienced early prosecutorial success because the Georgia defendants would face extraordinarily harsh punishment and deportation if they were to lose at trial.
But with the filing of the ACLU's lawsuit, and its exhibits containing testimony from government informants who note that they "only sent me to Indian stores," (see page 16 of the claim), Tulia isn't seeming like such a distant point of reference any more. In fact, it's a little too close for comfort.