Gerald Goines, the mendacious former Houston narcotics officer who had a habit of framing drug suspects, received two concurrent 60-year prison sentences on Tuesday for causing the deaths of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were killed during a 2019 raid that Goines instigated by falsely accusing them of selling heroin. Since Goines is 60 years old and won't be eligible for parole until he serves half of his prison term, the penalty probably amounts to a life sentence.
"This is historic because we believe this is the first-ever murder conviction of a Houston-area law enforcement officer [for a crime] committed while in uniform," said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. The reason such verdicts have been so hard to obtain, she explained, is that "people want to believe in the police—that's who we're trained to trust from the time we're little."
In this case, that trust was sorely misplaced. Goines targeted Tuttle and Nicholas, a middle-aged couple who had lived at 7815 Harding Street for two decades, based on 911 calls from a neighbor, Patricia Garcia, who described them as armed and dangerous drug dealers who had sold her daughter heroin. Garcia, who did not even have a daughter, later admitted she had made the whole thing up, pleading guilty to federal charges related to her false reports.
After an officer visited the Harding Street house and saw no evidence of criminal activity, a supervisor asked Goines, a 34-year veteran assigned to Squad 15 of the Houston Police Department's Narcotics Division, to investigate Garcia's tip. Two weeks later, after an investigation that was cursory if not nonexistent, Goines obtained a no-knock search warrant, claiming a confidential informant had bought heroin at the house from "a white male, whose name is unknown." Goines reported that the informant had seen "a large quantity of baggies" containing heroin, along with "a semi-auto hand gun of a 9mm caliber"—a claim he used to bolster the justification for allowing him and his colleagues to enter the home without knocking and announcing themselves.
Police ultimately found personal-use quantities of marijuana and cocaine at the house. But there was no heroin, no other evidence of drug dealing, and no 9mm pistol. Goines later confessed he had invented the heroin purchase.
That information came to light only after the cops broke into Tuttle and Nicholas' home and immediately shot the couple's dog. Tuttle, who according to prosecutors was napping in a bedroom at the time of the raid, responded to the tumult and gunfire by grabbing a pistol and shooting at the intruders, injuring four of them—including Goines, who was shot in the face. The officers responded with a hail of at least 40 bullets, killing Tuttle and Nicholas, who was unarmed but allegedly looked like she was about to grab a gun from an injured officer.
During Goines' trial, prosecutors persuaded jurors that he was responsible for those deaths because he had lied to obtain the search warrant. Two weeks ago, they convicted him of murder under a statute that applies when someone "commits or attempts to commit a felony" and "in the course of and in furtherance of the commission or attempt…commits or attempts to commit an act clearly dangerous to human life that causes the death of an individual." The underlying felony was tampering with government records, a crime that Goines committed by lying in his search warrant affidavit.
During the trial, Goines' longtime confidential informant testified that he paid her to sign forms documenting fictional drug purchases. He also wanted her to help justify no-knock raids by saying she had seen guns in homes she never visited. Over 12 years, The Houston Chronicle reported, Goines obtained nearly 100 no-knock warrants, almost always claiming that informants had seen firearms in the homes he wanted to search. But he reported recovering guns only once—a suspicious pattern that no one seems to have noticed.
The disastrous Harding Street raid prompted Ogg's office to reexamine drug cases that were based on Goines' plainly unreliable word. They discovered what Ogg described as "a pattern of deceit" going back more than a decade. More than 30 convictions have been overturned as a result of that review.
"Gerald Goines has been a stain on the reputation of every honest cop in our community," Ogg said on Tuesday. "He was responsible for the deaths of these two people and for the false convictions of many others—and we believe there are more victims still out there….We hope other victims who have been hurt or wrongfully accused or even convicted see the courage of these families and also come forward."
In a reversal of the usual situation in drug war outrages that attract national attention, Goines is black, while Tuttle and Nicholas were white. But many of his other victims— including Otis Mallet and Frederick Jeffery, both of whom went to prison based on Goines' fabrications—were black, and Ogg's office emphasized that "Goines targeted people in poor parts of Houston" because he knew they would have trouble mounting an effective defense.
"You didn't see this happening in River Oaks or West University," said Assistant District Attorney Tanisha Manning, who prosecuted Goines along with Assistant District Attorney Keaton Forcht. "Goines preyed on predominantly poor communities who may or may not have the resources to fight back—but the people in those neighborhoods deserve the same protections that everyone else has."
Art Acevedo, Houston's police chief at the time of the Harding Street raid, initially hailed Goines as a "hero," portrayed Tuttle and Nicholas as dangerous criminals who were operating a locally notorious "drug house," and claimed neighbors were grateful that police had finally neutralized that purported threat. Even after Goines' lies were revealed, Acevedo bizarrely claimed the narcotics officers "had probable cause to be there" and insisted that the raid did not reflect "a systemic problem with the Houston Police Department."
Ogg saw things differently. "Houston Police narcotics officers falsified documentation about drug payments to confidential informants with the support of supervisors," she said in July 2020. "Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented."
On Tuesday, Ogg also implicated the war on drugs, which invites this sort of abuse: When your job involves creating crimes by arranging illegal drug sales, it is not such a big leap to create crimes out of whole cloth, especially if you are convinced your victim is guilty. Ogg said Goines' sentence sends "a strong message to anybody out there who's thinking about cutting corners as a cop or violating people's rights in order to simply make an arrest, so they can get credit for it in this war on drugs that's failed miserably."
Goines did not testify during his main trial or the sentencing phase, which was followed by 10 hours of deliberation before the jury settled on a penalty. "If there was a time for the defendant to speak up and to say something and perhaps give some answers to the families' questions and tragedy, this would be a good time," Tuttle's son, Ryan Tuttle, said in his victim impact statement.
Ryan Tuttle alluded to the claims, amplified by Acevedo, that tarred his father and stepmother as public menaces. "They were not drug dealers," he said. "They were victims of systematic failures of police work—specifically Gerald Goines….They were good people. They did not deserve this."
Goines' lawyers plan to appeal his conviction. During the trial, they conceded his lies but argued that the felony murder charges were inappropriate because his fraudulent affidavit did not cause the deaths of Tuttle and Nicholas, which the defense said they brought on themselves by resisting the police instead of surrendering. Forcht argued that Tuttle did not realize the intruders were police officers and reacted as "any normal person" would to a violent home invasion.
Goines also faces federal charges that could result in a life sentence. But it has been five years since that indictment, and at this point the federal case seems more than a little redundant. Although the elements of the federal charges, which allege that Goines willfully violated Tuttle and Nicholas' Fourth Amendment rights under color of law, are different from the elements of the state charges, the underlying conduct is the same, and Goines has only one life to serve in prison.
By contrast, two federal civil rights lawsuits filed by relatives of Tuttle and Nicholas, one of which names Acevedo as a defendant, could illuminate the systemic failures that allowed Goines to lie with impunity for years, allocating some of the blame to the officials responsible for them. Those cases are scheduled to be tried together next month.
According to The Houston Chronicle, Goines' conviction will not stop him from collecting his police pension. Under the collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the local police union, the Chronicle reports, Goines would have lost his pension if he had been "indefinitely suspended" after the Harding Street raid. But "Goines retired from the department before officials took any action against him."
The post Former Houston Drug Cop Gets 60 Years for His Deadly Lies appeared first on Reason.com.
