Gerald Goines' murder conviction highlights the potentially deadly consequences of testilying

Nearly six years ago, Houston drug cops killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, after breaking into their home to serve a search warrant. Last week, a jury convicted Gerald Goines, the former narcotics agent who got that warrant by reporting a heroin purchase that never took place, of aggravated murder.

Although this outcome was highly unusual, the dishonesty that led to Goines' prosecution is far more common. If your job is to facilitate crime by arranging illegal drug sales, creating crimes out of thin air isn't a big step, especially if you're convinced your victim is guilty.

Goines targeted Tuttle and Nicholas based on 911 calls from a neighbor, Patricia Garcia, who described them as armed and dangerous drug dealers who had sold heroin to her daughter. Garcia, who didn't even have a daughter, later admitted that she made the whole thing up and pleaded guilty to federal charges related to her hoaxes.

In his search warrant affidavit, Goines claimed that a confidential informant purchased heroin from a man at 7815 Harding Street, where Tuttle and Nicholas lived. Goines later confessed that he had fabricated this transaction, although he claimed that he had personally purchased heroin at the house the evening before the raid.

Prosecutors showed that wasn't true either. They presented evidence that Goines was 20 miles from the house at the time of the alleged drug purchase and had not visited the location that day.

As jurors learned during the sentencing phase of Goines' trial, his deadly lies were part of a long pattern. For more than a decade, drug suspects had complained that Goines was framing them, but no one in a position of authority took them seriously until it was too late for Tuttle and Nicholas.

For example, in 2008, Goines claimed he purchased crack cocaine from Otis Mallet. Mallet, who always insisted Goines was lying, served two years of an eight-year sentence before being released on parole. In 2020, the Texas Court of Appeals declared him “factually innocent.”

Mallet's case was one of 1,400 cases involving Goines that were re-examined by the Harris County District Attorney's Office following the Harding Street raid. As a result of this review, more than 30 convictions were overturned.

The informant who allegedly bought heroin from Tuttle worked with Goines for more than two decades. At first, she testified, she bought drugs from the suspects he identified, but eventually he paid her to sign forms documenting fictitious purchases.

If not for the disastrous Harding Street raid that resulted in a shootout that injured Goines and three other officers, the 34-year police veteran could have continued his job as usual. “Without the involvement of their superiors, Goines and others could never have exploited our community the way they did,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in July 2020. “Every check and balance that was in place to prevent this type of action Stopping behavior was bypassed.” “

It's hard to say how often this happens, since prosecutors, judges and juries tend to ignore the protests of drug defendants – especially those with previous convictions – and automatically accept the testimony of police officers like Goines they are believed to be honest and dedicated public servants. But similar scandals in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Francisco show that the problem of testilying is not limited to Houston.

“The perjury of police officers in court to justify illegal drug investigations is commonplace,” wrote Golden Gate University law professor Peter Keane, a former San Francisco police commissioner, in 2011. “One of the dirty little ones, not quite such secret secrets of the criminal justice system.” The system consists of undercover drug agents who deliberately lie under oath.

Testilying “is a perversion of the American justice system that goes directly against the rule of law,” Keane noted. “Yet it is the everyday way of doing business in courtrooms across America.”

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