Gerald Goines' sentence could rest on testimony from those wrongly convicted before botched raid

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Former Houston police officer Gerald Goines could face up to life in prison after his conviction on two murder charges, and the jury may finally hear about the impact his lies had on other cases.

From 2008 to 2019, Goines was the primary investigator in 441 criminal cases and the only witness in 164 of those cases.

Since the botched Harding Street raid in 2019, over 30 convictions have been overturned, with three of those actually found innocent, sources in the Harris County District Attorney's Office told ABC13.

That includes a man named Otis Mallet, who was arrested in southeast Houston in 2008. He was the first to be declared innocent in February 2020.

"I was innocent. I was falsely accused," Frederick Jeffery told Eyewitness News after his release from prison in 2022.

Jeffery spent six years in prison on a drug possession charge based on Goines' testimony until a court decided that testimony was false.

RELATED: Gerald Goines case already shifted Houston police and helped set the wrongfully accused free

However, all of this information was kept from jurors during the trial.

"Those things are considered irrelevant in determining whether or not a person's guilty or innocent of the charges that are against them," attorney Murray Newman said.

The rules are different when it comes to sentencing. And there's talk that some of those wrongly convicted of crimes based on Goines' testimony could testify at his sentencing hearing.

"Any time someone's wrongfully convicted, they are unfairly having their life wrecked, and I think that that's gonna be a big selling factor in what the prosecution puts forward against him," Newman said.

Murray said the jury reached a verdict relatively quickly, which indicates they'll likely lean toward a harsher sentence.

Sentencing begins at 9 a.m. on Thursday.

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