Steven Mallet waited 10 months in jail before finally pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He spent more than a decade with the conviction hanging over his head.

Ten minutes after Mallet limped to his seat in court on Thursday, Harris County District Judge Kelli Johnson declared him innocent.

“This appears so egregious on its face, it’s a miscarriage of justice,” Johnson said, of Mallet, one of the numerous defendants arrested and convicted on the testimony of former Houston narcotics officer Gerald Goines. “And most of all, I think it causes a breakdown in confidence in our American justice system.”

“I’m glad to hear this wrong has been corrected,” she said, promising to sign off in support of his case and recommend “all relief” to the Court of Criminal Appeals.

Mallet is the second person declared actually innocent after being arrested by Goines, though prosecutors on Thursday said they are reviewing more than 250 convictions he obtained over the last 11 years of his career.

The former Houston drug cop came under scrutiny after orchestrating a raid in January 2019 in which two people died and five officers were injured. Weeks after the raid, police said Goines had lied about drug buys that were the basis for the raid, and he and his former partner were arrested. Goines now faces murder charges in state court and for civil rights violations in federal court. His former partner faces tampering charges in both state and federal court. Both officers have since retired from the force.

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The fraudulent operation led to investigations by the FBI and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, where prosecutors dismissed dozens of Goines’ pending cases in the months after the raid.

In recent weeks, however, prosecutors have for the first time begun to tackle innocence claims by people who were convicted because of Goines’ casework and testimony.

On Feb. 3, prosecutors said they believed Mallet’s brother, Otis Mallet, was innocent. The two men were arrested in 2008 on drug charges after Goines said that while undercover, he had bought drugs from the two men. Goines’ testimony and casework was the linchpin of the two cases, prosecutors said.

At trial, a jury convicted Otis Mallet and sentenced him to eight years in prison. He served two years behind bars before being paroled, but he always maintained his innocence and later challenged his conviction. Steven Mallet, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to time served in order to get out of jail. He said he did so rather than wait for a trial in which there was “no guarantee that a jury could be persuaded that Goines was lying,” according to a statement prepared for his Thursday court hearing.

“It happens more than you would think,” his attorney Bob Wicoff said, describing Mallet’s ordeal as “deplorable.”

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg noted that while Otis Mallet had always argued his innocence — even after his conviction — his brother’s case was significant because Steven Mallet had pleaded guilty to the charge filed against him, marking a higher threshhold for prosecutors when considering whether or not to declare him actually innocent.

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“Mr. Mallet was in a slightly different spot [than his brother], he pled guilty,” she told Judge Johnson. She said that in spite of the plea, the fact that Goines did not tell the truth about the case “caused our office to be used as a tool to wrongfully convict Steven Mallet as well as Otis Mallet and this represents a huge travesty of justice.”

The Mallet brothers are unlikely to be the only people who Goines arrested whose cases are reviewed and potentially overturned, she said, explaining that her prosecutors have identified 441 cases Goines worked between 2008 and 2019, which led to 263 convictions against 234 defendants. It’s unclear how many of those cases are single-witness cases with similar circumstances to the Mallet brothers, where Goines’ testimony or casework was the basis on which prosecutors and police obtained convictions.

“The claims that are going to tend to be successful are going to be these one-witness claims,” said Josh Reiss, chief of the DA’s post conviction unit. “How many of those one-witness claims there are in these 263, I don’t know. It’s going to take some time to dig in, but that’s what we’re going to do.”

st.john.smith@chron.com

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