| On February 24, 2005, Chicago police officer Alvin Jones and his partner, Kenneth Young Jr., arrested 15-year-old London Weekly, 20-year-old Cecil White, and 58-year-old James Arrington on charges of possession of cocaine at the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Illinois.
At the time, Jones and Young were working in plainclothes as part of a drug enforcement unit headed by Sgt. Ronald Watts.
A preliminary hearing was held on March 18, 2005 , before Cook County Circuit Court Judge Kevin Sheehan. Officer Jones testified that he and Young were conducting premises checks at 527 East Browning Avenue, one of the buildings in the housing development. On the seventh floor, Jones said he pushed on a security door that had been installed on a vacant apartment as part of a program to keep out squatters. When the door opened, he said he and Young went inside.
Jones testified that he saw Weekly cutting crack cocaine with a razor blade. He said that he saw White putting the cocaine into baggies. Jones said he and Young arrested Weekly and White. Jones said he confiscated 17 rocks of cocaine from a piece of glass in front of Weekly. He said he also confiscated eight baggies of cocaine from White.
He said he then went into a bedroom of the apartment. There, he said he discovered Arrington in a closet, attempting to stuff four baggies of heroin into a hole in the wall.
At the end of Jones’s testimony, Judge Sheehan dismissed the case against Arrington. He ruled there was probable cause to charge White and Weekly.
Both were subsequently indicted on charges of possession of cocaine. Weekly was accused of possessing 3.9 grams of cocaine. White was accused of possessing 1.9 grams of cocaine.
On June 28, 2005, White went to trial before Cook County Circuit Court Judge Henry Simmons Jr. White chose to have Judge Simmons decide the case without a jury.
Jones again testified that he and Young entered the vacant apartment and discovered Weekly and White in the kitchen cutting and bagging cocaine.
White’s defense attorney, Frank Himel, argued that Jones was testifying falsely. “If it happened the way the officers were saying, that they quietly opened the door [with] no noise, and they are able to walk down the hallway undetected, place Mr. White and Mr. Weekly into custody without any issues, then why is that third individual [Arrington] in the back hiding with drugs if they weren’t alerted to the presence of the police?”
Himel noted that the Chicago Housing Authority, which oversaw the housing development, was “putting these steel grated doors on these places for a reason–so people don’t get in. And now the door is wide open? People are in there cutting and bagging drugs, and that…they would leave it unlocked so someone can walk in?”
“Somewhere along the line, the defendant [White] ran out of hands,” Himel added. He noted that Jones testified that he first saw White placing cocaine into a Ziploc bag and that when Jones approached, White had eight bags in his hand. “So I don’t know how he is able to bag drugs and still hold onto eight bags,” Himel argued. “It seems an unlikely scenario in which he would have to be using a third hand to hold eight [bags of] drugs and bag drugs at the same time.”
Himel argued that “if the police were to tell the truth, they would say they found three people inside an apartment with dope and no particular way to place ownership or possession on any of them.”
At the conclusion of the arguments, Judge Simmons acquitted White. “The evidence shows…it was more likely than not that the defendant was engaged in some sort of illegal activity, but I am not quite certain what happened on that particular day under these facts,” Judge Simmons said. “Finding: not guilty.”
On September 20, 2005, Weekly, who had been charged as an adult, appeared before Judge Simmons and pled guilty in Cook County Circuit Court to possession of cocaine. He was sentenced to two years of probation.
In 2012, Sergeant Watts and one of the members of his unit, 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.
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 CIU began investigating the cases and agreed that the convictions should be vacated and dismissed. By the end of 2023, more than 185 convictions tainted by Watts and members of his unit had been dismissed.
In 2024, Flaxman filed a motion to vacate Weekly’s conviction. In a sworn affidavit, Weekly described how he had been framed by Jones. Weekly said that he was standing with friends in front of the building at 527 East Browning Avenue when police cars drove up.
“Officers took me and the other people inside the building,” Weekly said. “Officers searched me and didn’t find anything illegal. I saw officers searching other people, too. A few minutes later, I saw officers bringing Cecil White through the area we were in. That was the first time I saw Cecil on that day.”
Weekly said he and White were taken to the police station where he learned that the officers claimed they had arrested him and White and Arrington in the vacant apartment and that he had been cutting up drugs.
“These claims are absolutely false,” Weekly said. “I was not inside the building when the officers stopped me. I was never on the seventh floor on February 24, 2005. I was not with Cecil White when the officers stopped me. I never had drugs in my possession…on February 24, 2005.”
Weekly said he told his defense lawyer he was innocent, but was advised to plead guilty. “I was young and scared, I was offered probation, and I wanted to get out of jail,” Weekly said in the affidavit. “Also, I knew that I could get a longer sentence if I lost my case at trial. At the time I pleaded guilty, I did not know that Cecil White had been found not guilty at trial.”
On May 29, 2024, Weekly’s motion was granted. His conviction was vacated, and the charge was dismissed.
Weekly subsequently filed a petition seeking a certificate of innocence to enable him to seek compensation from the state of Illinois. In June 2024, Weekly filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction.
– Maurice Possley
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