| On February 13, 2014, police officers in Houston, Texas, raided a house in search of drugs. One of the officers involved in the raid was Gerald Goines, who had prepared the application requesting a search warrant.
Goines wrote in the application that a confidential informant had performed a controlled buy at the property on Rosalie Street the day before and had also seen a .40-caliber handgun near the backdoor. The application said the informant had bought crack cocaine from “Big E,” who was described as a Black male, about 35 years old, 6 feet tall, and weighing around 300 pounds.
During the raid, police arrested 38-year-old Gene Walker. They said they found about 156 grams of cocaine, but no weapon. Walker was charged with possession with intent to deliver and tampering with evidence, as Goines said he tried to get rid of the drugs as the raid was taking place.
Walker was released on bond on March 15, 2014. He sought to suppress the evidence collected during the raid, asserting that the search warrant wasn’t valid. Walker said he didn’t live at that address, and that he was shorter and skinnier than the confidential informant’s description of “Big E.”
Later, Walker moved for the state to disclose the identity of the confidential informant, so that this person might testify at his trial.
“It is the contention of the defendant that he had just stopped by the house when the warrant was executed and that any cocaine found in the house was possessed and belonged to Big E, who after this incident pled to a pending narcotics case and is in prison,” the motion said.
A judge denied the motion regarding the confidential informant on May 5, 2017. On May 23, 2017, Walker pled guilty to the two charges. He was sentenced to seven years in prison on each charge, with the sentences to run concurrently.
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. Also 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 Walker, who might have been convicted on false evidence presented by Goines.
Walker had been released from prison on April 1, 2019. On July 6, 2023, Walker filed separate state petitions for a writ of habeas corpus on both convictions. (Walker’s incarceration and parole ended in 2022.)
The petitions said that Goines’s affidavit in support of the search-warrant application should be presumed false because it took place during a period when the courts had already determined Goines had committed other misconduct related to the falsification of official reports.
In its investigation, the district attorney’s office found that the confidential informant used in Walker’s case had also been used to support a search-warrant application that led to the wrongful conviction of Frederick Jeffery (hyperlink). The informant had told the Houston Police Department in 2019 that she and Goines had started doing things “the wrong way” about three or four years earlier, and that she would sometimes get paid for buys she did not make.
The Harris County Public Defender’s Office and the district attorney submitted proposed findings of fact recommending that Walker’s convictions be vacated. The findings noted that an officer who accompanied Goines on the raid had given a different account of the events and said that Walker was arrested quickly and without incident after the police came through the front door.
A judge adopted those recommendations on April 30, 2024, and forwarded the case to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
The appellate court granted the writ petitions on October 30, 2024. It said Walker’s pleas were induced by false evidence presented by Goines.
The state dismissed the cases on December 2, 2024.
In September 2024, a jury in Houston convicted Goines of two counts of murder. He was sentenced on October 8, 2024, to 60 years in prison.
– Ken Otterbourg
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