Blackburn\u2019s work in Tulia helped set the stage for major reforms to Texas\u2019 criminal justice system and gave rise to the Innocence Project of Texas.
Blackburn is seen here with his family, from left to right, grandson Oliver, son Sam, daughter-in-law Scotney, grandson Archer, Jeff Blackburn, and partner Jessy Tyler.In summer 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.
On Tuesday, the man once called the “trouble-makingest lawyer in West Texas” died of kidney cancer at age 65. In a series of interviews leading up to his death with a Houston Chronicle reporter, Blackburn reflected on the changes that Tulia spurred and insisted that the work was much bigger than any one person.
“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.”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.
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. 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.
Blackburn convinced 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 convince Perry to pardon the remaining defendants. “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.”
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. Thousands of people had been wrongfully convicted of various offenses across the state, he reasoned. 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.
But by 2014, the politics of the state, and the country, were rapidly shifting. Republicans, including newly elected Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, were taking harder lines on crime. The fragile coalition between libertarians and Democrats that had pushed criminal justice reforms through the Texas Legislature dissolved.
In 2015, he quit. “What was once a movement has now become a business,” he wrote in a public resignation letter.For Blackburn, leaving the Innocence Project did not mean scaling back his activism. He soon began what would be a years-long, 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 ex-husband had committed. He later hired her as his paralegal.
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