1. Read the article specifically in these areas:
   1. Abstract
   2. Introductions
   3. Highlighted sections on the Rampart and Tulia Incidents
2. Review the section in the module that focuses on police misconduct.
3. Complete th discussion questions below.
4. Provide two complete responses to peer discussion posts. ("I agree with you." is not a complete post) Respond with full comments with support or areas where you see another aspect or perspective.

Discussion Questions:

1. How were the Rampart and Tulia situations similar and how were they different? Explain specific information to support your response.
2. How do these types of incidents affect policing in the community? What can be the long-term impacts?
3. Do you think the courts should disregard cases against offenders when the only evidence is a police officer's statement (no corroborating evidence)? Explain your answer.
4. If you were in charge of the department, identify steps you would take to deal with these incidents. (I would just fire all the officers is not a complete answer).

In short, Rampart and Tulia produced numerous exonerations and received a significant amount of national attention, but they are not unique. Revelations of large-scale police misconduct both preceded and post-dated them, suggesting that police misconduct leading to the wrongful conviction of innocent persons is a disturbingly common feature of the criminal justice system.All of the victims in the scandal were blue-collar Mexican immigrants who spoke little or no English.* Another Tulia-like scandal erupted more recently in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, where seventy narcotics cases made by a single undercover officer were dismissed following revelations that the undercover officer had lied under oath in a criminal investigation. Before the scandal broke, at least twenty persons in cases made by the undercover officer had already pled guilty." An even larger Rampart-style corruption case has unfolded in Camden, New Jersey. 50 Other incidents have also grabbed recent headlines. Gross and Shaffer have identified twelve separate incidents involving group exonerations based on police misconduct involving exonerations of at least 1,100 people.Coleman had engaged in 'blatant perjury" and was "the most devious, nonresponsive law enforcement witness this court has witnessed in twenty-five years on the bench in Texas. " Coleman was eventually tried and convicted of one count of perjury and sentenced to ten years probation. Although the settlement was contingent on approval by the Court of Criminal Appeals, when that approval was not immediately forthcoming, the Texas legislature passed a bill "specifically authorizing" the judge "to grant bond to the defendants." Texas Governor Rick Perry then asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to review the cases. Pardons were granted to all thirty-five Tulia defendants convicted as a result of the sting operation." Two more individuals later were exonerated by courts.* Rampart and Tulia together account for nearly two hundred cases of wrongful conviction and represent two large sets of exonerations stemming from police corruption scandals. But these are not the only major scandals that have recently beset law enforcement organizations in the United States, or even in Texas. In Hearne, Texas, numerous cases in 2001 were dismissed following revelations that a drug task force was systematically targeting black residents in an effort, allegedly, to drive them from the community." As in Tulia, the evidence against the defendants in these cases consisted solely of the uncorroborated assertions of a single, unreliable, police informant. Although most cases were dismissed prior to conviction, some innocent defendants pleaded guilty before the police wrongdoing was exposed.""A year later, in the so-called "Dallas Sheetrock scandal," at least thirty-nine criminal cases were dropped or dismissed after it was discovered that white powder allegedly recovered from criminal suspects and identified through field-tests as cocaine was actually ground up sheetrock packaged to look like cocaine.writing on the wall, however, most of the remaining defendants agreed to plead guilty. In all, forty-seven persons were charged and thirty-five were convicted. Of the twelve who were not convicted, several were placed on deferred adjudication. As these cases were tried, however, it became increasingly evident that Coleman's testimony was not credible. Defense attorneys discovered that Coleman had been arrested on theft charges in a neighboring county and lied about it on his employment application to the task force." They also learned that Coleman had a history of employment problems, mental health problems, and significant unpaid debts." Worse still, it became increasingly evident that Coleman's bosses in Tulia, as well as the prosecutor in the Tulia cases, knew of Coleman's problems and lied about them under oath in the course of the Tulia trials." After the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals remanded four of the Tulia convictions for evidentiary hearings on claims that the prosecutor had failed to turn over material exculpatory evidence as required by Brady v. Maryland," hearings were conducted before a different trial judge. In the course of the hearings, it became clear that Coleman had perjured himself on numerous occasions during the Tulia trials, and that other law enforcement officials may have done so as well." Ultimately, the state agreed to a global settlement with defense attorneys in which it stipulated that Coleman was not a credible witness, vacated every conviction obtained as a result of the sting operation without seeking new trials against any of the defendants, and provided $250,000 to be divided among the defendants."In exchange, the defendants agreed not to sue the county." The state judge who presided at the hearing found "that Mr.even clarify, those allegations." In speaking with an investigative panel. some officers, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retribution, expressed concerns that the department did not genuinely seek to uncover the extent of the corruption. In fact, the L.A.P.D. failed to produce a promised "after-action" report which, according to the department, was going to include "the exact nature and disposition of each allegation." Consequently, whatever the department may have uncovered about widespread corruption throughout the force remains outside the public domain. In the spring of 2003, while the Rampart story was winding down, news of another major police scandal broke, this time not out of a major metropolitan police force but instead in the tiny west Texas town of Tulia. located in Swisher County. The Tulia operation began as a roundup of suspected drug dealers in the summer of 1999, but transformed into what some described as a wholesale assault on the black residents of Tulia. The operation was spearheaded by a freelance agent named Tom Coleman." Working undercover, Coleman claimed to have bought powder cocaine from more than 20% of the adult black residents of Tulia."In all, nearly fifty persons were convicted of selling drugs to Coleman, in most cases based solely on Coleman's uncorroborated testimony." The first several Tulia defendants fought the drug charges at trial and were convicted and sentenced to draconian prison terms." After seeing thean unimagined scale, implicating police officers in wrongful killings, indiscriminate beatings and violence, theft, and drug dealing. Perez's testimony also implicated dozens of police officers in systematic acts of dishonest law enforcement, exposing hundreds of instances in which evidence or contraband was planted on suspects, false statements were coerced or fabricated, and police officers offered perjured testimony in court. Perez's confessions prompted the L.A.P.D. to re-name its investigative task force the "Rampart Task Force."The Task Force was charged with corroborating Perez's allegations of corruption within Rampart CRASH."What followed was, in the words of one independent commission, one of the "worst police scandals in American history. Ultimately, the District Attorney was able to corroborate hundreds of Perez's allegations and the L.A.P.D. entered into a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice, submitting to federal oversight of departmental operations. As a result of the scandal, more than three hundred prisoners filed writs of habeas corpus seeking to overturn allegedly tainted convictions, and approximately 156 felony convictions were dismissed or overturned as a result of "Rampart related" writs, 110 of which were either initiated or unopposed by the District Attorney. The extent of wrongdoing by the L.A.P.D., however, remains mystery to this day largely due to the overall ineffectiveness of the L.A.P.D.'s internal investigation of the police force. Although Officer Perez claimed that "ninety percent of the officers that work CRASH, and not just Rampart CRASH, falsifyingion" and "put cases on people,"* no investigation or follow-up was ever undertaken to explore, orOn December 16, 1997, the L.A.P.D. arrested police officer David Mack on charges of stealing $722,000 from a Los Angeles area Bank of America. Three months later, the department fired two other officers, Brian Hewitt and Daniel Lujan, for severely beating a handcuffed prisoner in an interrogation room.'The common thread was that all three officers were either former or current members of the Rampart CRASH, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, unit. Rampart is an area covering 7.9 square miles to the northwest of downtown Los Angeles." It is the most densely populated portion of Los Angeles, with 36,000 people per square mile, and is widely known as a locus of gang activity. " At the same time, the Rampart CRASH unit had a reputation for operating in a largely autonomous fashion with little to no oversight."The arrest of Officer Mack and termination of Officers Hewitt and Lujan motivated L.A.P.D. Chief of Police Bernard C. Banks to form a special task force to investigate the Rampart CRASH unit. Then, on March 2, 1998, six-and-a-half pounds of cocaine disappeared from an evidence room in Los Angeles. "Within a week, the special task force investigators honed in on Los Angeles police officer Raphael Perez, a member of Rampart CRASH, as the primary suspect. A year later, trial on the charge ended with a hung jury. "* Shortly thereafter, Perez cut a deal with prosecutors, agreeing to cooperate with a government investigation of police wrongdoing in the Rampart CRASH unit. Perez worked with investigators over the next year, divulging over 4,000 pages of interrogation transcripts. "Perez's testimony revealed police corruption onABSTRACT This study gathers data from two mass exonerations resulting from major police scandals, one involving the Rampart division of the L.A.P.D., and the other occurring in Tulia, Texas. To date, these cases have received little systematic attention by wrongful convictions scholars. Study of these cases, however, reveals important differences among subgroups of wrongful convictions. Whereas eyewitness misidentification, faulty forensic evidence, jailhouse informants, and false confessions have been identified as the main contributing factors leading to many wrongful convictions, the Rampart and Tulia exonerees were wrongfully convicted almost exclusively as a result of police perjury. In addition, unlike other exonerated persons, actually innocent individuals charged as a result of police wrongdoing in Rampart or Tulia only rarely contested their guilt at trial. As is the case in the justice system generally, the great majority pleaded guilty. Accordingly, these cases stand in sharp contrast to the conventional wrongful conviction story. Study of these groups of wrongful convictions sheds new light on the mechanisms that lead to the conviction of actually innocent individuals. I. INTRODUCTION Police misconduct causes wrongful convictions. Although that fact has long been known, little else occupies this corner of the wrongful convictions universe. When is police misconduct most likely to result in wrongful convictions? How do victims of police misconduct respond to false allegations of wrongdoing or to police lies about the circumstances surrounding an arrest or seizure? How often do victims of police misconduct contest false charges at trial? How often do they resolve charges through plea bargaining? While definitive answers to these questions must await further research, this study seeks to begin theinquiry. Specifically, this study attempts to improve our understanding of the intersection of police misconduct and criminal justice, and, more generally, to contribute to the ever-growing bank of knowledge about wrongful convictions. What we do know about wrongful convictions comes largely from studies of cases terminating in exonerations. These exoneration studies have produced a rich dataset from which several factors that contribute to wrongful convictions have been identified. While critically important, this dataset has significant limitations, chief of which is selection bias. The vast majority of the exonerations studied to date occurred in rape cases following DNA testing and murder cases often involving the death penalty. Such cases, comprising a tiny sliver of the criminal justice system workload, are relatively unrepresentative of the vast majority of felony convictions. As a result, and as researchers compiling these datasets acknowledge, the most closely analyzed data on wrongful convictions does not capture a representative sample of the probable distribution of wrongful convictions that occur. Drawing on new empirical data, this article adds to the wrongful convictions dataset by assessing another group of exonerees-those exonerated following revelations of systemic police and/or prosecutorial misconduct. Specifically, this Article examines two high-profile scandals that saw the wrongful conviction and later formal exoneration of large numbers of persons. To date, little attention has been paid to such exonerees. This, I argue, has affected perceptions of the scope and nature of the wrongful conviction problem. The profile of persons exonerated following revelations of major police misconduct varies dramatically from that of the typical capital murder or DNA exoneree. The defendants in the mass exoneration cases were convicted of different types of crimes, faced less severe punishments, and were far more likely to plead guilty than other exonerated defendants. Using extant data, earlier exoneration studies have found that the primary cause of the wrongful convictions in those studies is witness misidentification. Based on those findings, somecommentators and reform-minded organizations have drawn the conclusion that witness misidentification is, in general, the leading cause of wrongful convictions.' While the former claim was correct at the time those observations were made, the latter generalization likely was not warranted. The data we currently have is simply too limited to permit any accurate generalizations about how frequently wrongful convictions occur, or which contributing factors generate them, in specific or even rough proportion.* Moreover, as one of the nation's leading experts on exonerations, Professor Samuel Gross, has frequently emphasized, the primary causes of wrongful convictions are almost certainly crime-specific. That is, the factors that tend to cause wrongful convictions in rape cases are different from those that cause wrongful convictions in murder cases, and different from the causes of wrongful convictions in burglary cases, assault cases, and drug cases. The next generation of research must approach wrongful convictions in a more fine-grained manner. To that end, this study gathers data from two mass exonerations resulting from major police scandals. These exonerations are starkly different than most of the exonerations previously studied. In the "mine- run" cases (if there is such a thing) resulting in individual exonerations, often as a result of DNA testing, several contributing factors, ranging from eyewitness misidentification to false confessions to faulty forensic evidence and testimony, have been identified. In contrast, wrongful convictions in the mass exoneration cases are tied together by a single dominant causal factor: police misconduct. Prior exoneration studies have not focused on this group of exonerees, nor, by and large, have theyincorporated data from these cases into the datasets." This Article does just that. The experiences of those wrongfully convicted as a result of police misconduct differ from other exonerees in interesting and potentially important ways. The exonerations resulting from the Rampart and Tulia police scandals raise the profile of police misconduct as a known cause of wrongful convictions. In addition, the tendency of exonerees in these cases to plead guilty rather than go to trial confirms what many have long suspected: that the problem of wrongful convictions is not limited to the small number of cases in which innocent defendants unsuccessfully contest their guilt in a jury trial. The article proceeds as follows: Part II describes the Rampart and Tulia cases in detail, and sets forth the circumstances leading to mass exonerations in those cases. Part III provides a brief description of data about wrongful convictions that has been generated in the literature to date. Part IV begins by describing the data used in this study. It then examines the Rampart and Tulia exonerations in more detail, identifying a subset of "actually innocent" exonerees in these cases that can be compared with exonerees in other studies. Part IV then undertakes a closer analysis of the circumstances and mechanisms that led to convictions of innocent Rampart and Tulia defendants. One of the most interesting contrasts between the mass exoneration cases studied here and other instances of wrongful conviction is that, as compared to other groups of exonerees, the great majority here pleaded guilty. Part V takes a closer look at this critically important phenomenon and offers some hypotheses as to why innocent defendants plead guilty in these cases at such a high rate. Disturbingly, the evidence suggests that the factors at work here- coercive penalties for contesting guilt at trial, coupled with few effective defense strategies and unsympathetic forums-may describe the prevailing conditions for a large number of, perhaps even most, criminal defendants. Part VI considers various types of police misconduct, documenting the prevalence of both "procedural perjury" and "substantive perjury," and the fine line between them. Part VI then compares the experiences of actually innocent exonerees with those who the evidence suggests, though wrongfully convicted, were probably not actually innocent. Based on this comparative data, it finds evidence that innocence does dissuade some defendants from pleading guilty, but that any "innocence effect" has only a minor impact on guilty plea rates. Part VII briefly concludes