XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, houston.general, alt.politics.democrats   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
   From: uncivilized.black@jungle-animals   
      
   This week, nearly six years after Houston cops killed a middle-aged couple   
   falsely accused of selling heroin, a jury began considering the murder case   
   against Gerald Goines, the former narcotics officer who instigated the deadly   
   raid. His lawyers concede    
   that he fabricated the basis for the no-knock warrant that authorized him and   
   his colleagues to break into the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas on   
   January 28, 2019. But they argue that he is not responsible for their deaths   
   and therefore should    
   not have been charged with murder.   
      
   Goines, a 34-year veteran who retired after the raid, also faces a charge of   
   tampering with a governmental record, a felony punishable by two to 10 years   
   in prison. That charge is based on a search warrant affidavit in which Goines   
   claimed a confidential    
   informant had purchased heroin from a middle-aged "white male, whose name is   
   unknown," at 7815 Harding Street, where Tuttle and Nicholas lived. The   
   informant supposedly saw a 9mm semi-automatic pistol and a "large quantity of   
   plastic baggies" containing    
   heroin at the house.   
      
   As Goines later admitted, none of that was true. Goines, who was shot in the   
   neck during the Harding Street raid, was taken to a hospital, where he   
   confessed that he had invented the "controlled buy" he described in his   
   affidavit. But he claimed that he    
   personally had bought heroin from Tuttle.   
      
   That was not true either, defense attorney Nicole DeBorde admitted during her   
   opening statement at Goines' trial on Monday. "While it's true you're not   
   going to be happy with Gerald Goines for some of the things that he said that   
   were not true in that    
   affidavit, and later in that hospital, he didn't murder anybody," she told the   
   jurors. "He is not legally responsible for murder. This is a case of the wrong   
   charges being filed. There are other consequences for him."   
      
   The two murder charges are based on a statute that applies when someone   
   "commits or attempts to commit a felony" and "in the course of and in   
   furtherance of the commission or attempt…commits or attempts to commit an   
   act clearly dangerous to human life    
   that causes the death of an individual." That charge is inappropriate in this   
   case, DeBorde argued, because Goines' underlying felony—producing the   
   fraudulent search warrant affidavit—did not cause the deaths of Tuttle and   
   Nicholas.   
      
   In DeBorde's telling, that outcome resulted from the couple's decision to   
   resist the invading police officers instead of surrendering. According to   
   DeBorde, Tuttle and Nicholas both knew the men who broke down their door and   
   immediately killed their dog    
   with a shotgun were police officers. She said Tuttle nevertheless grabbed a   
   revolver and came out shooting, injuring Goines and three other officers,   
   while Nicholas tried to grab a gun from one of them. "Nicholas' choices to not   
   respond to instructions    
   by police and to try and grab the gun of a fallen officer is the cause of her   
   death," DeBorde said.   
      
   According to this account, Tuttle and Nicholas got what they deserved.   
   Prosecutors told a different story.   
      
   When the cops charged into the house around 5 p.m., Harris County Assistant   
   District Attorney Keaton Forcht said, Nicholas, a 58-year-old cancer patient,   
   was sitting on a couch watching TV while Tuttle, a disabled 59-year-old Navy   
   veteran, was asleep in    
   a bedroom. According to the prosecution, Tuttle responded to the tumult with   
   gunfire because he thought he was defending his home against violent criminals.   
      
   "Evidence will show Gerald Goines was legally responsible for every shot in   
   that house, whether it was from officers or Dennis Tuttle," Forcht said. "Mr.   
   Tuttle reacted as anybody would, any normal person, hearing guns ring out in   
   their house, their    
   doors blown in, his wife on the couch, the dog is dead in the living room. He   
   grabs his pistol and comes storming out."   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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