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Gregory Haynes

Summary of Watts scandal
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/PublishingImages/Cook_County_seal.jpg
On January 28, 2006, 24-year-old Gregory Hayes and some friends were hanging in the lobby of a building in the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Illinois. As they chatted, Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts and members of his team of undercover drug unit officers, including officer Alvin Jones, swarmed into the lobby and put everyone against the wall. Everyone was searched, and nothing illegal was found.

Haynes was arrested and taken to the police station. “After about 30 minutes, Jones came out of a room with a big zip-lock bag and set it down on the table,” Haynes said.

Haynes said he looked at officer Kallatt Mohammed, who was one of Watts’s officers. “I asked Mohammed why they were doing this…Mohammed just looked at me and said it was out of his control.”

Haynes was charged with possession of 17 baggies of heroin.

On May 29, 2007, Haynes pled guilty in Cook County Circuit Court to possession of a controlled substance. He was sentenced to four years in prison and given credit for 496 days spent in the Cook County Jail.

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. In 2021, Jones was stripped of his police powers and placed on administrative leave.

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 the end of 2021, more than 90 convictions tainted by Watts and members of his unit had been dismissed.

On April 22, 2022, following an investigation by the CIU, Haynes’s conviction, along with the convictions of more than 40 others framed by Watts and his fellow officers, were vacated and dismissed. By that time, more than 200 convictions had been dismissed in the corruption scandal. Haynes subsequently received a certificate of innocence, and was awarded $85,000 in compensation from the state of Illinois. He also filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago.

– Maurice Possley

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Posting Date: 5/4/2022
Last Updated: 3/1/2023
State:Illinois
County:Cook
Most Serious Crime:Drug Possession or Sale
Additional Convictions:
Reported Crime Date:2006
Convicted:2007
Exonerated:2022
Sentence:4 years
Race/Ethnicity:Black
Sex:Male
Age at the date of reported crime:24
Contributing Factors:Perjury or False Accusation, Official Misconduct
Did DNA evidence contribute to the exoneration?:No