| On December 4, 2006, 33-year-old Tyrone Herron was walking out of a building in the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Illinois, when an undercover Chicago police officer approaching the lobby entrance ordered him back inside.
In the lobby, Herron noticed several other men were detained. He said he was put alongside the others and everyone was searched. No drugs or other contraband were found.
An officer that Herron later learned was Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts then entered the lobby. Watts told the group that if anyone could tell him where to find drugs, he would let everyone go free. After 10 to 20 minutes, when no one offered any information, “Watts announced he wanted us all arrested,” Herron later said.
“At the police station, I was handcuffed to a bench with three other men,” Herron said. “Watts showed us several bags of drugs. Watts said he was not going to put the drugs on all of us, but later he changed his mind and said he was.”
Herron was charged with possession of heroin. On January 17, 2007, Herron 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 (CIU) 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 CIU agreed that White’s conviction should be vacated and dismissed the charge.
In November 2017, following a re-investigation of numerous other cases involving Watts, the CIU dismissed 17 convictions involving 15 more defendants, including the conviction of Lionel White Jr., the son of Lionel White Sr.
By January 2021, more than 80 convictions tainted by Watts and members of his unit had been dismissed. On February 19, 2021, following an investigation by the CIU, the convictions of Herron and eight others were vacated and dismissed.
Herron was later awarded a certificate of innocence from the state of Illinois, which qualified him for state compensation. He received $30,000 in 2021. He filed a federal lawsuit in September 2021 against the city of Chicago and numerous police officers, including Watts.
– Maurice Possley
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