While writing yesterday’s Houston forensic backlog story, it occurred to me that I never heard the outcome of the pending murder trial of Ex-Houston Police Officer Gerald Goines. Goines is accused of falsifying information on the warrant on a no-knock narcotics raid in which he and his fellow officers killed two people.
As far as I can tell, that’s because the trial hasn’t happened yet, despite the original raid happening in January of 2019. The most recent activity was the judge refusing to dismiss the charges, and another court limiting the mere presence of Goines in a case as a possible cause for appeal to a ten year stretch starting in 2008.
The only other news I’ve found was that Steven Bryant, another officer on the raid, pled guilty to federal tampering charges back in 2021.
I know that Flu Manchu lockdowns delayed a lot of trials all around the country, but four and a half years is an inordinately long time for a murder trial to be pending, as you start to run into due process concerns. Four years was around the time that all the charges in the Waco biker shootout case were dismissed. And that was a much more complex case with hundred of defendants and mountains of prosecutorial pigheadedness.
The Democrats running Houston’s criminal justice system today claim to care deeply about stopping police misconduct, but don’t seem capable of dispensing justice in anything like a timely manner to the one glaring redball of police misconduct they already have in their laps.