| On January 4, 2003, Chicago police officers led by Sgt. Ronald Watts raided the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Illinois. They arrested 35-year-old George Ollie on a charge of possessing three baggies of heroin.
Ollie claimed the drugs were planted. After his defense lawyer said he could not overcome the testimony of police officers, he pled guilty on January 14, 2004 in Cook County Circuit Court to possession of a controlled substance. He was sentenced to two years in prison and was released two days later—having spent more than a year in Cook County Jail leading up to the day he pled guilty.
In 2012, Watts and fellow officer Kallatt Mohammed were caught on tape stealing money from a man they believed was a drug courier, but who was in fact working as a confidential FBI informant. In 2013, Watts and Mohammed pled guilty in U.S. District Court to taking money from the informant. Mohammed was sentenced to 18 months in prison, and Watts was sentenced to 22 months in prison.
Federal prosecutors said Watts “used his badge and his position as a sergeant with the Chicago Police Department to shield his own criminal activity from law enforcement scrutiny. He recruited another CPD officer into his crimes, stealing drug money and extorting protection payments from the drug dealers who terrorized the community that he [Watts] had sworn to protect.”
In 2006, Ben Baker
was convicted twice—once alone and a second time with his wife, Clarissa Glenn, on charges of narcotics possession based on false testimony from Watts. In 2015, Joshua Tepfer, an attorney at the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, filed a petition to vacate Baker’s first conviction, citing the corruption of Watts and his unit. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit agreed in January 2016 that Baker’s first conviction should be vacated, and the petition was granted. Later in 2016, a petition filed on behalf of Baker and Glenn also was granted. In December 2016, Tepfer and attorney Joel Flaxman filed a motion for a new trial on behalf of Lionel White Sr., another defendant who claimed he had been falsely convicted based on the corruption of Watts and his team. “The full known scope of the corrupt, more-than-decade-long criminal enterprise of Sergeant Watts…shows that Sergeant Watts led a tactical team of Chicago police officers that engaged in systematic extortion, bribery, and other related crimes…from as far back as the late 1990s through 2012,” the motion said.
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit agreed that White’s conviction should be vacated and dismissed the charge.
On September 24, 2018, the Cook County State's Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit dismissed Ollie’s conviction. Ollie was granted a certificate of innocence and was awarded $30,000 in compensation from the state of Illinois.
Ollie filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago in February 2019.
By 2018, more than 50 convictions tainted by Watts and members of his unit had been dismissed.
– Maurice Possley
|