| On February 17, 2006, 20-year-old Raynard Carter, 21-year-old Alhummza Stokes and another friend were walking toward the Ida B. Wells public housing project in Chicago, Illinois when several police cars pulled up. Carter, Stokes and their friend were searched, but nothing illegal was found.
The officers, led by Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts, then moved them into the lobby and ordered them to their knees. Watts went upstairs and returned holding baggies of drugs. He began asking them for money and when Carter said he had no money, Watts slapped him in the face several times.
When Stokes said he would not give any money to crooked cops, Officer Kallatt Mohammed hit Stokes in the back of the head, knocking him face forward to the floor. Watts then struck Stokes several times in the head.
Carter and Stokes were then taken to the police station. Carter was charged with possessing 22 baggies of crack cocaine. Stokes was charged with possession of 5.8 grams of cocaine.
On July 10, 2006, Carter and Stokes pled guilty in Cook County Circuit Court to possession of a controlled substance. They were each sentenced to three years in prison. Carter was released on February 16, 2007. Stokes was released on October 28, 2007.
In 2012, Watts and 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.
Beginning in December 2016, Tepfer and attorney Joel Flaxman filed motions for new trial on behalf of dozens of men and women who claimed they were 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,” their motions said.
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit began investigating the cases and agreed that the convictions should be vacated and dismissed.
By 2018, more than 50 convictions tainted by Watts and members of his unit had been dismissed.
On February 11, 2019, Carter’s conviction was vacated and the charges were dismissed, bringing the total to more than 60 convictions erased in the Watts corruption scandal. Carter subsequently was granted a certificate of innocence and was awarded $90,000 in state compensation. Carter also filed a federal civil rights lawsuits against the city of Chicago in May 2019.
On February 11, 2020, Stokes’s conviction, along with convictions of 11 other people framed by Watts and his fellow officers, was vacated and dismissed following an investigation by the Conviction Integrity Unit. The dismissals brought the total of dismissed cases to nearly 80. Stokes filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago in August 2020. He also was granted a certificate of innocence and was awarded $30,000 in compensation from the state of Illinois.
– Maurice Possley
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