| On September 6, 2011, Officer Gerald Goines of the Houston Police Department in Texas arrested 20-year-old Andre Dillard and charged him with delivery of a controlled substance. In court papers, Goines said that Dillard sold him less than a gram of cocaine.
A week later, while in jail, Dillard sent an affidavit to a judge in Harris County District Court that said he was innocent.
Dillard wrote that he was playing video games inside a convenience store and waiting for a ride home. He said an officer entered the store and ordered everyone to leave.
Outside, the police handcuffed him, took his ID, and ran his name through the court system. “I then asked them what have I done,” he said. “I know my name is clear and I don’t have any outstanding warrants. The next thing I know I was placed in the back seat of the officer’s car and told that I fit the description of a person involved with [delivery of a controlled substance.]
Dillard pled guilty to the charge on November 16, 2011, and received a sentence of 180 days in a state jail.
More than seven years later, on January 28, 2019, Goines led a raid on a home belonging to 59-year-old Dennis Tuttle and his 58-year-old wife, Rhogena Nicholas. Goines obtained a no-knock warrant after telling a judge that he had set up a controlled buy of narcotics there using a confidential informant. Goines, his partner, Steven Bryant, and other officers broke down the front door of the home and shot a dog that they said lunged at them, which prompted a gun fight. Tuttle and Nicholas were killed.
The Houston Police Department opened an investigation. When Goines’s informant could not be found, Goines eventually admitted there wasn’t an informant.
In April 2019, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office dismissed several dozen pending cases involving Goines and Bryant and began reviewing more than 2,200 cases the two officers handled throughout their careers.
In August 2019, Goines was charged with felony murder, and Bryant was charged with tampering with a government record after the raid. By then, Goines and Bryant had retired.
Goines was indicted by a federal grand jury in November 2019 on charges that he deprived Tuttle and Nicholas of their civil rights by killing them.
In February 2020, Houston District Attorney Kim Ogg said that a review by her office’s conviction-integrity unit (CIU) of cases Goines played a substantial role in between 2008 and 2019, found 69 people, including Dillard, who might have been convicted on false evidence presented by Goines.
Dillard filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on November 16, 2022. He said that he was innocent and that he would not have pled guilty if he knew about Goines’s extensive history of misconduct.
On May 12, 2023, Judge Andrew Wright of Harris County District Court recommended that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals grant Dillard’s habeas petition because he was denied due process through the use of false evidence and that his plea was involuntary.
On August 23, 2023, the appellate court granted Dillard’s writ. The state dismissed the charge on September 29, 2023.
– Ken Otterbourg
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