Trials in HPD’s botched 2019 raid collide

Judge eyes urgency in Harding Street criminal cases

The federal judge presiding over a civil rights lawsuit in the deadly 2019 Harding Street raid sent a message to Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg on Friday: Don’t delay criminal trials related to the police scandal.

U.S. District Court Judge Alfred Bennett during a hearing about the lawsuit told Stan Clark, an assistant district attorney, to pass a message about moving forward on the criminal cases to Ogg.

“It would be out of the ordinary if a civil action was the first trial, as opposed to the criminal trial,” Bennett said. “I would hope that there was some sense of urgency in the district attorney in bringing this matter to justice as she sees fit.”

Ogg’s office declined comment on Friday afternoon.

A trial over the civil rights suit is scheduled to begin in November. The families of the couple killed in the botched drug raid — Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas — accused the city, the Houston Police Department, former Police Chief Art Acevedo and individual police officers, including disgraced officer Gerald Goines — of violating the couple’s Fourth and 14th Amendment rights.

The Jan. 28, 2019, raid on a home in the Pecan Park neighborhood resulted in a gunbattle between police and the couple. Multiple officers were wounded, some seriously, and the couple died.

Investigations that followed the raid determined that the warrant was obtained on false evidence from a made-up criminal informant, according to prosecutors.

Goines, who is accused of writing the warrant, has been charged with felony murder over the raid. Goines and multiple other officers who worked in the same narcotics unit as Goines

have also been charged with engaging in criminal activity, over an alleged overtime scheme uncovered during the investigation into the raid.

The first Harris County indictments connected to the raid were handed down in 2019. Neither Goines, nor any of the police officers charged, have gone to trial.

A federal criminal case against Goines is also still pending, and is without a court date. No federal prosecutors were in court Friday and no mention was made about that case.

Bennett’s message to Ogg came days after Goines was re-indicted on the murder charges. In late March, a Harris County judge threw out the previous murder indictments, agreeing with Goines’ criminal attorneys that the first indictments lacked specifics about the accusations against him.During Friday’s hearing, Clark told Bennett that Goines’ felony murder trial was still scheduled to begin in late June.

The overtime scheme trial is scheduled for September, according to court records.

The Harding Street criminal trials have been delayed by its large size, which include copious amounts of evidence to be disclosed and reviewed. The case also coincided with slowdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it hit a speedbump in February when the first judge presiding over the case was suspended from the bench.

Ogg has publicly said the DA’s office was ready to move forward on criminal trials since at least May 2023. The scheduling of a trial is ultimately up to a judge.

The hearing in Bennett’s ninth-floor courtroom was ostensibly to deal with other issues related to the civil case. The lawyers representing Tuttle and Nicolas’ family asked Bennett to order more depositions against some of the police officers targeted in the lawsuit, arguing their attorneys had improperly stopped them from answering some questions.

The city’s attorneys argued they were following a verbal order from Bennett to not delve into questions about the criminal investigation into the overtime case. Bennett conceded he gave unclear instructions, and told the attorneys to review the deposition questions that hadn’t been answered and report to him which questions would have also been stopped by defendants pleading their Fifth Amendment rights. He said he would make a decision on more depositions after receiving that report.

Clark, the attorney from the district attorney’s office, was also in the courtroom because of the depositions.

While the county is not a party to the civil lawsuit, Ogg’s office is seeking copies of the civil depositions as part of the criminal investigations into Goines and the other officers.

The defense attorneys — including the attorneys representing the city of Houston — opposed releasing the depositions to Clark, because they could incriminate them in the criminal investigation or harm their defense in the lawsuit.

Bennett denied the district attorney’s request, and then asked Clark to pass on his message.

“You can see the tension it has created in this case,” Bennett said.