Sentencing of Gerald Goines: Jury deliberations are underway after a medical emergency aborted the trial

Houston – The sentencing phase of Gerald Goines' murder trial continued this morning after Goines was recently released from the hospital. Closing arguments were halted Thursday and Goines was taken from the courthouse in an ambulance.

Jurors are trying to determine what sentence former Houston police narcotics detective Gerald Goines should receive after the jury found him guilty of aggravated murder two weeks ago. They have been deliberating since about 10 a.m. after closing arguments ended.

Goines faces five years to life in prison.

RELATED: Goines trial put on hold due to medical emergency

“This may be the worst case of badge abuse Harris County has ever seen,” said District Attorney Tanisha Manning.

Jurors were not told that it was Goines who suffered a medical emergency that suddenly cut short the trial last week and that he was taken to the hospital by ambulance. As Manning continued her closing argument, she told the jury, “Before I was interrupted,” and continued: Goines was a “corrupt police officer” who had a “pattern of misconduct” long before January 2019, when he lied to get one To obtain a search warrant for Rhogena, Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle's home in southeast Houston on Harding Street. It was a drug raid that ended with the shooting of four officers and the death of the couple.

“No community will be purged of an official who uses his badge as a tool of oppression rather than a shield. Lawlessness under the guise of justice is the lowest form of hypocrisy,” says Manning.

“What was found in this rolling mobile pharmacy that Gerald Goines describes as a police vehicle? Tell me why Gerald Goines has a car full of empty bags and scales, drugs from 2016, other people's IDs, other people's pill bottles and multiple guns?” prosecutor Keaton Forcht asked jurors during his closing argument.

“For decades, day or night, depending on what he was asked to do, Gerald Goines went into neighborhoods where you and I might not go to do his best work,” Goines attorney Nicole DeBorde told jurors.

“In April 2008, Gerald Goines planted drugs on Otis Mallet…This is a conscious decision to wrongfully convict someone in our community…All Gerald Goines knew was that he (Mallet) planted so many drugs that the possible sentence would be life in prison. “ Sentence,” Forcht spoke in detail about Mallet in his conclusion.

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Manning did so too, adding: “There we see the first crack in (Goine's) crumbling foundation of corruption.”

“For 34 years, this tall, gentle man received one outstanding review after another for the work he did to eliminate drugs from our streets,” DeBorde reminded jurors.

“Nine times I walked in front of you with a different affidavit with a search warrant forged by this defendant…In all nine cases there was a paragraph in it about using a weapon in a drug transaction, because that's not enough for this man (Goines) simply.” to break into our house uninvited, he wants to do it in the most violent and ruthless way with a warrant. He lied about the use of weapons nine times…Nine times someone was arrested and charged “A crime was committed, put in a police vehicle, taken to jail and some of those people were wrongly convicted on the back of Gerald Goines,” said Fear the jury.

“Do we wish he hadn’t made these decisions about what he laid out in the affidavit? Yes, we do, but we also know from the facts and circumstances we learned at trial that he knew he was going into a house where he… “There were a lot of guns,” Goine's attorney told the jury about the lies he told to secure the search warrant on Harding Street.

“Gerald Goines regularly falsely wrote search warrant affidavits and busted down doors in 2018 and 2019, and it cannot be ignored that he was almost always in the same neighborhood he was paid to protect… He took liberties . He is “He has inherited the trust and confidence of our community in our own police department,” says Forcht.

“The prosecution had the opportunity to give you all the ugly information they could dig up about this 60-year-old, broken, destroyed human being after a 34-year career with the Houston Police Department in the community he loved,” DeBorde says.

“In 2019 he will be exposed for the monster we know he was. He preys on these communities he is supposed to protect,” Manning added in her closing argument.

“When Dennis Tuttle marched through his living room to the door where uniformed police stood, and Gerald was as close to Dennis Tuttle as I am now, as you are in the jury box. Gerald walked forward with his arms outstretched to pick up his colleague. “He flew off the ground and was shot in the face,” DeBorde told jurors.

To that, Manning responded in her closing argument: “He's not a hero, and he's certainly not a victim in this…The real victims, the one officer who's now paralyzed. The real victims, the Nicholas family, the Tuttle family, Rhogena Nicholas, Dennis Tuttle.

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Forcht added, “Cedell Lovings, he's serving a life sentence in a wheelchair because Gerald Goines would rather decimate the Third District than protect it.”

“Is there anything we haven't said about Gerald to show you his heart and what was going on in his head? …The community will forever know Gerald as a murderer…He's 60, but he's already over 60. His health.” All this man is remotely entitled to is a death penalty. Five years he could serve any day, combined with the conviction he already has, is more than enough to punish a man who can and will never stop punishing himself until his last “Our community is safer with someone like Gerald, who has a heart to serve and a heart to care,” DeBorde concluded.

“That’s exactly right. This man should scare every single one of us because he has done this to a community time and time again… All the lies, all the cheating, you have to ask yourself, and we still do.” Why? Is it really just a desire to distort justice, or is it actually something more sinister? asked Forcht in his closing argument.

“If he can kill life with his police badge, you can give life with your jury badge,” Manning urged the jury.

“Anything short of a life sentence gives Gerald Goines hope. “It's the same hope that, throughout his career, he gave every day to people who were less fortunate than him,” Forcht told jurors before they began deliberating.

Defense attorneys contend Goines spent most of his life taking drugs off the streets of Houston and coaching children in disadvantaged communities. Not only did he act as a mentor for them, but he also bought sports equipment for children who couldn't afford it and picked them up and brought them to games and exercises.

“His whole life was a masquerade. Gerald Goines has two sides. Gerald Goines is a nightmare because he is a living, breathing example of what it means to be corrupted by power…this courtroom is filled, both sides, filled with people serving a life sentence at the hands of Gerald Goines is serving time,” says Forcht.

Goines was two weeks away from retirement when Nicholas and Tuttle died in that deadly no-knock raid on Jan. 28, 2019. Although Goines never drew his gun, he was found guilty of aggravated murder for “causing the deaths” by lying to secure the search warrant.

The jury is still deliberating.