Nearly six years behind bars after conviction based on testimony from a Houston narcotics officer

In mid-February 2008, Houston officers conducted a raid at 5603 Elmlawn Drive, uncovering a gram of PCP and 132 grams of cocaine. Several men were taken into custody at the scene, including Byron Prophet, who was 23 at the time and ultimately found guilty on two drug charges, receiving a 16-year prison term.

During Prophet’s trial, Gerald Goines, a narcotics officer with the Houston Police Department (HPD) for 24 years, testified that Prophet had entered the residence twice via a door from the garage, using a key that was later found in Prophet’s pocket to unlock the barred entry. Prophet testified that he had never been inside the house and did not possess a key.

Although the jury accepted Goines’ testimony, the tragedy of a 2019 drug raid—initiated by Goines through fabricating a heroin sale—exposed him as utterly untrustworthy. The ensuing investigation prompted the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn Prophet’s convictions in 2024. Yet Prophet, who had been released on parole in 2014, had already served nearly six years behind bars based on the unquestioning testimony of a drug officer with a long history of lying to obtain search warrants, justify arrests, and secure convictions. The case exemplifies how the war on drugs can invite police falsehoods that go undetected for years due to lax oversight and credulous courts.

In a federal lawsuit filed last week, Prophet argues that accountability for the injustice he endured reaches beyond Goines, who is now serving a 60-year sentence for his involvement in the 2019 raid. Prophet contends that, long before that incident, Goines’ supervisors were aware of—or should have been aware of—his habit of wrongfully implicating innocent people.

That is precisely what Goines did in 2019 when he obtained a no-knock warrant to search the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, a middle-aged couple he falsely accused of drug dealing. As Goines later admitted, the search warrant affidavit described a heroin purchase that never occurred. As a result of that fraudulent affidavit, police forced entry into the couple’s home and shot their dog. When Tuttle responded to the break-in by grabbing a revolver and firing at the intruders, police killed him and Nicholas, who was unarmed. Several officers, including Goines, sustained serious injuries during the raid, largely from friendly fire.

That deadly fiasco prompted the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to re-examine thousands of drug cases tied to Goines. It concluded that 69 people might have been convicted based on false evidence he provided. Prophet was one of them.

Prophet has consistently maintained that he had nothing to do with the drugs found at Elmlawn Drive. He says he rode his dirt bike to his grandmother’s house that afternoon. His uncle, a mechanic, also lived nearby, and Prophet sought his help to repair the dirt bike. Prophet testified that he saw his uncle working on a car in front of Louis Pugh’s house, the raid’s target, which stood a few doors from his grandmother’s home.

Prophet testified that he did not associate with Pugh, who was a friend of his uncle, and that he never entered the house, though he did retrieve tools from Pugh’s garage. Goines, by contrast, claimed that Prophet repeatedly entered the house, spending a total of 13 minutes inside. He also claimed to have seen Prophet’s state-issued identification card on a kitchen counter near the PCP and cocaine. He said Prophet tried to flee when the raid began and had a key to the house in his pocket when he was searched.

According to Prophet, none of that was true. But the case pitted a seasoned narcotics officer against a young man who admitted prior burglary and three minor drug offenses. The jurors—apparently unconvinced that Goines might be lying—accepted his version. So did the 1st District Court of Appeals, which upheld Prophet’s convictions in 2010, deeming Goines’ testimony sufficient to establish Prophet’s alleged connection to the drugs.

The jurors might have been less inclined to trust Goines if they had known how he obtained the warrant for the Pugh house. “Goines wrote in the application that a confidential informant had performed a controlled drug purchase for the police at the property two days earlier,” the lawsuit states. “In reality, there was no genuine confidential informant and no drugs were purchased.”

That fabricated evidence foreshadowed the fraud that would culminate in the deaths of Tuttle and Nicholas 11 years later. And according to the lawsuit, it was part of a pattern that should have been evident by the time Prophet was arrested.

By that point, Goines was “well-known” for submitting search-warrant affidavits that “falsely claimed a confidential informant had purchased drugs” at the targeted property, the complaint says. “Goines would fabricate evidence that led to drug raids, falsify reports, and ‘pay off’ officers by falsifying overtime records of officers who participated in the drug raids. The City of Houston and HPD officials were aware that Defendant Goines used these tactics and had a problematic history of violating residents’ constitutional rights, but allowed him to continue operating in such fashion.”

In addition to Goines, the defendants named in Prophet’s lawsuit include two other officers, the city of Houston, and former Police Chief Harold Hurtt, who led the HPD from 2004 to 2009. The complaint contends that Officers James Yencha and Richard Salter conspired with Goines to violate Prophet’s constitutional rights and that the HPD “turned a blind eye” to their misconduct.

During “the period leading up to Mr. Prophet’s wrongful conviction” in October 2008, the HPD “engaged in a systematic pattern of fabrication of evidence, withholding of exculpatory information, and other illegal tactics, the sum total of which completely corrupted the investigative process,” the complaint asserts. “Before the investigation at issue here and continuing afterward, dozens of cases have come to light in which Houston police officers were involved in suppressing exculpatory evidence or fabricating false evidence to cause the conviction of an innocent person for serious crimes they did not commit.”

In 2002, the lawsuit notes, KHOU, the CBS affiliate in Houston, “conducted an investigation into HPD and revealed there was a culture of untrained staff, missing exculpatory records, contaminated evidence, and inadequate supervisory oversight of officers.” Although those findings should have prompted “drastic change within HPD,” the complaint says, Houston officers “continued to fabricate evidence, suppress evidence, and use other illegal tactics.”

The lawsuit mentions several other individuals who were arrested by Goines, including George Floyd, who lived in Houston at the time and would later be killed by police in Minneapolis. In 2004, the complaint says, Goines claimed Floyd had “sold $10 of crack cocaine to a third party,” but “the alleged drug money was never recovered” and the alleged buyer was never identified.

Two years later, according to the lawsuit, Goines “falsely claimed” Reginald Christian “informed officers that there were drugs in his vehicle prior to its search.” Goines “fabricated this statement by Christian, as well as the drugs purportedly found in Christian’s vehicle.”

Prior to Prophet’s arrest, “dozens of residents made complaints to HPD about the wrongful arrests, fabricated evidence, and suppressed evidence, but the Department turned a blind eye,” the complaint says. “Nor did the City of Houston end Defendant Goines’ employment when it learned he was fabricating informants, evidence, and reports, and suppressing the truth.”

The pattern continued after Prophet’s arrest. In April 2008, Goines arrested Steven Mallet and his brother, Otis, claiming they had sold him crack. But that was not true, and the brothers were exonerated in the wake of the raid that killed Tuttle and Nicholas.

The National Registry of Exonerations lists more than three dozen drug defendants, including Prophet, the Malett brothers, and Frederick Jeffery, whose convictions were vacated after Goines’ dishonesty came to light. If supervisors like Hurtt had done their jobs, Prophet argues, that list would be shorter.

“We have zero indication that this is a systemic problem with the Houston Police Department,” Police Chief Art Acevedo, who led the HPD from 2016 to 2021, said after Goines was charged with felony murder in August 2019. Acevedo reiterated that view after Goines was indicted on federal civil rights charges three months later, dismissing “the chances of this being systemic.”

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg saw things differently. “Houston Police narcotics officers falsified documentation about drug payments to confidential informants with the support of supervisors,” she said in July 2020. “Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented.”

Contrary to what Acevedo suggests, these are systemic issues. So are the incentives created by the war on drugs. When a crime consists of nothing more than handing a police officer or an informant money in exchange for information, the evidence often consists solely of the buyer’s word, paired with drugs that could have been obtained through other means. This situation invites dishonest cops to invent drug offenses and claim credit for the resulting arrests, as Goines did for years with impunity.

When your job is to manufacture crimes by arranging illegal drug sales, it is not a huge leap to fabricate crimes from scratch, especially if you are persuaded that your target is a drug dealer. And when that happens, defendants cannot count on jurors or judges to detect the deception, as Goines’ many victims discovered.