Black Houston Cop Sentenced to 60 Years in Prison for Killing White Couple He Falsely Accused of Selling Heroin [question; if a white cop killed a Black . . never mind]

From [HERE] 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. [MORE]