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The Gerald Goines Fallout Continues

Oct 06 2024
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In January 2019, the Houston Police Department (HPD) staged a militarized raid on the residence of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas. The raid, which became known as the Harding Street Raid, was initiated based on false information provided to a criminal district court judge by former HPD officer Gerald Goines, and corroborated by former HPD officer Steven Bryant. In the police affidavit to justify the “no-knock raid,” Goines cited a non-existent informant’s purchase of a controlled substance at the residence. The raid left Tuttle, Nicholas, and their pet dog dead.

The fallout of that fatal raid revealed widespread corruption and misconduct in the HPD’s narcotics unit by Goines and others. This scandal led to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office agreeing that dozens of convictions involving Goines would have to be reversed or modified.

As for Goines, he was indicted for two counts of felony murder in connection with the Harding Street Raid, and on September 26, 2024, a jury convicted the disgraced former police officers on both counts.

Ironically, the day before Goines’ conviction, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) issued a decision in yet another Goines-involved drug case. This case involved Reginald Jerome Christian, who, in 2009, was convicted through a guilty plea and sentenced to two years and nine months on a possession of cocaine offense. Goines was involved in Christian’s arrest. He was one of the scores of people notified in 2019 by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office that Goines was being relieved of his police duties and was under criminal investigation.

Christian filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that his 2009 conviction should be reversed for the following reasons:

  • Actual innocence,
  • A Brady violation,
  • A violation of his due process rights, and
  • Involuntary guilty plea.

Christian filed a subsequently amended habeas petition saying he would not have pled guilty had he known about Goines’ widespread misconduct in other drug cases. The 184th Criminal District Court recommended that habeas relief should be granted and Christian’s 2009 guilty plea should be set aside. The CCA agreed to hear the case to determine whether Goines’ misconduct fell within the parameters of misconduct that “gives [rise] to an inference of falsity,” citing its previous 2022 decision in Ex parte Mathews and Ex parte Coty. The court then said that given an inference of falsity, two collateral questions would have to be answered before relief could be granted in the Christian case:

  • Assuming an inference of falsity under Mathews applies, do the facts of this case rebut that inference of falsity
  • Assuming an inference of falsity applies and was not rebutted by the facts of this case, was the false evidence provided by Gerald Goines material to Applicant’s guilty plea?

The Inference of Falsity

“A guilty plea involves the waiver of several constitutional rights and therefore must be entered knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily with sufficient awareness of the relevant circumstances and likely consequences. Guilty pleas induced by threats, improper promises, or misrepresentations are not voluntarily entered.” [Texas courts] have recognized that false evidence may cause a defendant to be misinformed such that the defendant’s knowledge of the relevant circumstances was insufficient for his or her plea to have been entered voluntary. The “key factor” remains “whether a defendant has ‘sufficient awareness of the relevant circumstances and likely consequences’ such that his plea is a knowing, intelligent act.” Voluntariness is determined by considering all of the relevant circumstances surrounding a guilty plea.

“To establish a false-evidence claim, applicants must generally establish that evidence was false and that the false evidence was material to the conviction or punishment…Once an inference of falsity has been established, the burden shifts to the State to offer evidence establishing that the [officer]at issue did not commit intentional misconduct in the case in question.”

Even if the State cannot rebut the inference of falsity, the burden still remains on the applicant to show that the evidence was material to his or her conviction. In the context of a guilty plea, the burden of materiality is established by showing that the applicant would not have pleaded guilty but for the falsified evidence against him.”

Christian’s version of the events surrounding his November 15, 2006, arrest was straightforward. He told the CCA that he did not tell Goines there were drugs in his vehicle prior to its search and that the drugs subsequently found in the vehicle, as stated in the officer’s offense report, must have been planted by Goines. Nonetheless, Christian pleaded guilty to the drug charge on June 30, 2009, in exchange for the time he had served in the county jail.

Christian initiated the habeas proceeding in 2019 after he received the letter from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office informing him that Goines was under criminal investigation. The district court recommended that the writ application be granted; however, the CCA noted that both the lower court and the DA’s office had failed to adequately develop the habeas record concerning the November 2006 arrest of Christian.  For example, the original offense record does not state whether Goines or any of the other officers present during the search actually found the drugs.

With its findings of fact and conclusions of law, the district court had found that Christian had satisfied the five factors of CotyMathews to establish an inference of falsity as it related to Goines’ version of the events concerning the November 2006 arrest incident. The CCA disagreed, finding:

“Having reviewed the record, such as it is, we determine that it does not support the habeas court’s conclusion that an inference of falsity has been established because the conduct at issue is not the type of misconduct that gives rise to an inference of falsity. Unlike other cases applying an inference of falsity to Goines’s conduct, here he was not the only officer involved in Applicant’s arrest, and the record before the Court fails to establish that he was even the first officer to find the contraband evidence. And because we hold that an inference of falsity does not apply in this case, there is no need to consider the second or third question set for submission. Therefore, we remand Applicant’s case to the habeas court to consider Applicant’s involuntary plea claim without applying an inference of falsity.”

In assessing the voluntariness of Christian’s 2009 guilty plea, the CCA instructed the district court that “Goines conduct is not the kind of misconduct that gives rise to an inference of falsity.” The appeals court explained its reasoning for this instruction:

“In both Coty and Mathews, the state actor shown to have engaged in malfeasance in other cases was the only witness against the defendant. In Coty, the lab technician with a pattern of ‘dry labbing’ in other cases was in sole possession of the evidence against the defendant, and he was responsible for the test results gleaned from that evidence used to implicate the defendant. In Mathews, Goines was the ‘sole witness’ to the crime allegedly committed by the defendant. Goines alleged the defendant sold him a substance that later tested positive for cocaine but there was ‘no other evidence in the record to identify [the defendant] as the seller because the uniformed officers did not witness the [undercover] sale.’ Goines was solely responsible for the alleged undercover drug bust that resulted in the collection of evidence and the defendant’s subsequent arrest.”

The CCA remanded the Christian case to the district court with the specific instruction that it consider the voluntariness of Christian’s 2009 guilty plea without an inference of falsity regarding Goines’s involvement in the case. In effect, since the facts surrounding Christian’s November 2006 arrest cannot be clearly developed, the voluntariness of his subsequent guilty plea is a stand-alone issue.

The takeaway from the Christian case is that, notwithstanding the non-applicability of the inference of falsity, Christian can still challenge the 15-year-old guilty plea conviction; however, he will do so without an inference of falsity and with a much more difficult burden to prove.

 

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