WHY ARE THESE TWO LYING ASSHOLES STILL ON THE FORCE?

A black Good Samaritan tried to stop a drunk driver. Houston police arrested him instead

 

By Neena Satija

 

Houston Chronicle

May 23, 2024

 

 

 

The nation’s most conservative federal appeals court just handed down an extraordinary rebuke of Houston's police department, which is already reeling from an ongoing scandal over dropped investigations and an ousted chief.

In a scathing opinion, a three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals slammed HPD for wrongfully arresting a man named Austin Hughes back in 2019. Hughes, a former police officer who was at the time working part-time security jobs, called 911 because he saw a drunk driver on the highway. The driver then crashed the car and ran into traffic, so Hughes used handcuffs to restrain him. But the HPD officers who responded let the driver go and instead arrested Hughes, who is Black, on charges of impersonating law enforcement. 

“This case does not involve excessive force, or split-second decisions, or the chaos of a chase,” wrote appeals judge Andrew Oldham, who authored the decision. “Rather it involves a simple, clearly established rule that all officers should know at all times … Do not lie.”

Oldham, who was general counsel for Gov. Greg Abbott before Donald Trump appointed him to the 5th Circuit, noted that police had ample evidence that Hughes did nothing wrong. Court records show another woman on the road called 911 that night and provided the same account of the erratic driver crashing into a highway median and trying to run into traffic. The driver Hughes detained also admitted to being drunk and failed a sobriety test. 

Yet HPD patrol officer Michael Garcia left all of that information out of the sworn affidavit he submitted in support of Hughes’ criminal charges. Instead, Garcia and his partner, Joshua Few, chose to believe the intoxicated man’s story: That Hughes attacked him in a fit of rage and pretended to be a police officer while doing so.  

In court, lawyers for the city argued that Garcia and Few are entitled to a sweeping legal protection for government workers called “qualified immunity.” But the 5th Circuit refused to grant the protection, Oldham wrote, because the police appeared to show such disregard for the truth. 

Paul Doyle, Hughes’ criminal defense lawyer, said he was encouraged to see the judges' ruling, especially in the wake of revelations that Houston police shelved tens of thousands of investigations into serious crimes using the internal code "Suspended — Lack of Personnel."

“You just wonder what motivated those officers,” Doyle said. “We can’t get people to respond to aggravated robberies and murders, but they’re gonna go after a Good Samaritan who happens to be African-American and go out of their way to arrest him when crime is rampant in our city. Like, actual crime.”

Garcia and Few both still work as patrol officers for the Houston Police Department. They are listed on the department's web site as recipients of a commendation from a local citizen in 2020, who praised their "kindness, compassion and professionalism" during a wellness check. 

HPD would not comment on whether Garcia and Few faced any discipline for what happened, but Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers' Union, said he does not believe they did. He also said he's confident they did nothing wrong, adding that police in Houston can't charge anyone with a crime without permission from the Harris County District Attorney's Office. 

"An officer can't just make an arrest on their own," he pointed out. "We have to contact the D.A.'s office, present the facts to them, and then they are the ones that determine what charges should be filed."

Hughes initially included Harris County D.A. Kim Ogg in his lawsuit, but a lower court ruled she is not liable for what happened. Still, the 5th Circuit Court appeared skeptical of her office's actions and called the charges against Hughes "frivolous." Documents show her office eventually agreed to dismiss the case against him, acknowledging that "no probable cause exists at this time to believe the defendant committed the offense."

“We agree with the Fifth Circuit’s opinion," said Joe Stinebaker, a spokesman for Ogg's office, in an email. "The decision to file charges was based solely on information provided by the arresting officer. The officer failed to inform the prosecutor that the defendant was a former police officer trained in DWI detection who truly acted as a Good Samaritan.”

‘They’re gonna kill somebody’

Hughes, who is 37, grew up in Detroit. He spent two years as a police officer in Auburn Hills, Michigan, but decided to leave the job in 2014 and move to Houston in search of a less stressful career and to be closer to some family members in the area. 

On March 23, 2019, Hughes was driving for Uber and working a part-time security job at a bar. He’d just picked up his paycheck from the bar, along with two Uber passengers, and was driving his Jeep Wrangler southbound on Interstate 610 when he noticed a white pickup weaving back and forth in front of him. 

Hughes turned on his hazard lights and dialed 911 around 2:37 a.m. “I’m a former police officer, I’m from Michigan … this guy is running between like, three or four lanes,” he said, according to a recording of the call. One of his passengers could be heard shrieking “oh God!” behind him. 

The pickup crashed into the highway median and Hughes pulled over behind it. “They’re gonna kill somebody,” he told the 911 dispatcher, later explaining that he approached the pickup to take the driver’s keys away before retreating back to his Jeep and waiting for police to arrive. 

A few minutes later, police still hadn’t gotten there, but the driver opened the door of the truck and ran onto the highway. 

“Stay in the car, bro, stay right there!” Hughes yelled, still on the phone with 911. He ran out to restrain the driver and used the handcuffs in his car, which he kept for his security job, to make sure the man couldn’t run off again and cause an accident. (Meanwhile, his Uber passengers requested a different ride).  

Hughes’ action is called a “citizen’s arrest.”  In Texas, civilians who believe they have personally witnessed a felony crime in progress or “an offense against the public peace” are allowed to detain the alleged perpetrator as long as they call police immediately — which is exactly what Hughes did, records show. 

Courtney Warren, the civil lawyer who filed the lawsuit on Hughes' behalf, said citizen's arrests are not uncommon. She cited numerous cases in which judges determined that citizens acted lawfully when detaining drunken drivers, including at least one example where a bar manager and his co-worker used handcuffs to stop someone from driving while intoxicated. 

But when Garcia and Few got to the scene and saw Hughes holding another man in handcuffs, they were skeptical. They grew even more suspicious after the detained man began telling them his story. 

‘They knew they were lying’

The man, who the Chronicle is not naming because he was never charged with a crime, claimed that he had met Hughes — who he called “Jesse” — at a flea market earlier that night and the two went drinking together. He said Hughes was the one driving the white pickup, not him, and that Hughes eventually grew angry with him, forced him out of the truck and kneed him in the back of the legs. 

“I asked Jesse why he was doing this and who gave him the right to do this,” the man recounted to police, according to their incident report. “Jesse told me he was a police officer. Jesse then put me in handcuffs.” 

The story made no sense. Hughes’ first name is Austin, not Jesse. No flea market was open that late on a Saturday night in Houston. And the man Hughes detained also admitted to police that he’d been drinking heavily. He failed all six components of the sobriety test police administered him, they wrote in their incident report.

But Garcia and Few believed the man anyway and allowed family members to come pick him up. Then, in consultation with Harris County prosecutors, Garcia submitted a probable cause affidavit to a judge seeking an arrest warrant for Hughes.

In the sworn affidavit, Garcia did not mention that the man admitted to drinking heavily and had failed a sobriety test. Garcia also claimed that Hughes refused to provide contact information for his two Uber passengers, who could have confirmed his story. But for privacy reasons, Uber doesn’t allow drivers to access that information, a fact Hughes said he repeatedly explained to officers that night. 

“They omitted several things from the report,” said Hughes in an interview with the Chronicle. “It’s damning to me and it’s just very baffling how somebody could just blatantly lie. And they knew they were lying.” 

Around 3 a.m. the next day, Garcia and Few showed up to Hughes’ apartment and took him to jail. He spent about 24 hours there before a judge agreed to release him on a personal bond. 

Hughes paid Doyle, the criminal defense lawyer, thousands of dollars to represent him. Doyle soon discovered that another woman driving on the highway that night had also called 911 and had essentially corroborated Hughes’ entire story. Three months later, prosecutors dismissed the charges. 

But for Hughes, the damage was lasting. He said he struggled for months to find work because of the arrest on his record. 

“It was a very depressing time in my life,” he said. 

Hughes considered filing a complaint against the police department over what happened. He decided to try and move on with his life after getting his record expunged. But Warren, the civil lawyer, convinced him to change his mind.

“If somebody is wrongfully arrested and they didn’t do anything, they usually have no recourse,” Warren remembers telling him. “At least you are taking this step to tell these officers they were wrong.” 

'A statement from the drunk. That's all you got.' 

Warren knew the case would be a tough one because of the “qualified immunity” doctrine. Established by the Supreme Court back in 1982, qualified immunity says a government official can’t be held liable for alleged misconduct unless they have "violated clearly established statutory or constitutional rights." 

What does that actually mean? Many judges have interpreted it to mean that a court must have already ruled that the government official violated someone’s rights in a case with similar circumstances. In other words, Hughes would have to prove that someone else had been wrongfully arrested just like he was, and that a court had already ruled in that person’s favor. 

In oral arguments before the 5th Circuit last December, an attorney for the city of Houston argued that no such case existed. 

“[Hughes] must find a case, a case, in his favor, to support his claim,” said the attorney, Craft Hughes (no relation to Austin Hughes). “Mr. Hughes has not found a single case in his favor.” 

The judges were not impressed. In often heated tones, they asked Craft Hughes how the officers could have believed the detained man’s story over Austin Hughes’ account. 

“A statement from the drunk. That’s all you got,” said Oldham, the Trump appointee and former general counsel for Abbott. 

“That’s the only person that was there,” Craft Hughes said, though he also later acknowledged that the drunk man's statement was “crazy.” 

“I don’t understand,” Oldham continued. “He was driving the car, he fails all the field sobriety tests. We just let him go? How in the world can you not arrest the man for DWI?” 

Hughes responded that no one had seen the man actually driving – even though multiple witnesses had. “There’s no dashcam video or anything,” he said. 

Another judge can be heard laughing in response. 

“It is unclear which part of this case is more amazing,” the final decision from the 5th Circuit reads. “(1) That officers refused to charge a severely intoxicated driver and instead brought felony charges against the Good Samaritan who intervened to protect Houstonians; or (2) that the City of Houston continues to defend its officers’ conduct.”