| On March 8, 2003, 21-year-old Lonnell Madison was living in an apartment at the Ida B. Wells public housing development. When he walked into the lobby, he saw Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts and other officers.
Madison was familiar with Watts because on prior occasions, Watts had stopped Madison and searched him. “Watts would always take whatever money I had on me and ask for information about drugs,” Madison later said. “Shortly before this [day], Watts told me [the] next time he saw me, he was gonna lock me up.”
So when Madison walked into the lobby and saw Watts holding a bag of drugs in his hand, he bolted. “I started running,” said Madison, who was 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighed 135 pounds. “I had no drugs or anything illegal.”
Some of Watts’s officers pursued Madison. “Eventually, one of the officers caught me and arrested me,” Madison said. “They took me to the station.”
“While being held at the station, Watts eventually came in and showed me some drugs,” Madison said. “I told him they weren’t mine. Watts put them on me anyway.”
Madison was charged with possession of 11 baggies of cocaine. On June 4, 2003, Madison pled guilty in Cook County Circuit Court to possession of a controlled substance. He was sentenced to one year in prison.
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.
Beginning in December 2016, Tepfer and attorney Joel Flaxman filed motions for new trials 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 (CIU) began investigating the cases and agreed that the convictions should be vacated and dismissed. By February 2022, more than 100 convictions tainted by Watts and members of his unit had been dismissed.
On February 8, 2022, following an investigation by the CIU, Madison’s conviction and the convictions of 13 others framed by Watts and his fellow officers were vacated, and the charges were dismissed. Madison was granted a certificate of innocence in April 2022 and awarded $42,000 in state compensation. In October 2022, Madison filed a federal civil rights lawsuiit against the city of Chicago.
– Maurice Possley
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