Halle Berry Gupta in Hollywood

Daily Variety has reported that film producers Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins have hired Karen Croner, who wrote One True Thing, as the scriptwriter, and Berry for the role of Gupta. Berry had won the Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball.

In July 1999, on a single night, 46 people in Tulia—including 40 African Americans, three Mexican Americans, and three Caucasians closely linked with the African American community—had been arrested on drug charges based on the testimony of a lone undercover narcotics agent and Ku Klux Klan member Thomas Coleman. Though no drugs, money or guns were found during the arrests, they had been sentenced.

Gupta—who earlier this year was one of the four recipients of the annual Reebok Human Rights award—got involved in the case soon after graduating from Yale College. She has talked of facing discrimination herself, growing up in the United States, England and France.

Gupta started out working in fields of policy and social justice, including as a community organiser for youth violence prevention at Harvard School of Public Health and as an intern at the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Three months after graduation, she received an Open Society Institute Soros Justice Fellowship, through which she began her work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF).

In the Fall of 2001 she began work in Tulia, Texas, as lead counsel for the LDF in the 1991 drug bust case. The whole proceedings under which the Tulia residents had been convicted reeked of racial bias.

The youngest member of a team of experienced lawyers, Gupta orchestrated a complex campaign. She eventually gained an evidentiary hearing before a special judge. The judge concluded that sustaining the convictions would be ‘‘a travesty of justice’’, and Governor of Texas Rick Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole then agreed to grant pardons to all those convicted—not only those who had insisted their innocence at trial, but also those who had pleaded guilty out of fear.

Gupta currently works with the LDF as an Assistant Counsel in the areas of criminal justice and civil rights. On the organisation’s website, the note on Gupta says: ‘‘She still remembers encountering verbal harassment and racial taunts during her time in England, and those experiences had a profound impact on her political consciousness.’’

Gupta’s success in overturning the conviction in the Tulia case was on the lines of the famous environmental lawsuit moved by Erin Brockovich. A law clerk, she had conducted an individual investigation that in 1996, forced the giant utility company Pacific Gas and Electric Company to dole out $333 million in damages to more than 600 residents of Hinkley, California, who had been exposed to a toxic substance for three decades.

The film version of Brockovich’s story had gone on to get five Oscar nominations, including Best Actress award for Julia Roberts. Will it be a repeat for Tulia?