On September 22, 2007, 21-year-old Alonzo Griffin was in the lobby of a building in the Ida B. Wells public housing complex in Chicago, Illinois, when someone yelled that the police working with Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts were coming.
Immediately, Griffin ran out. He had been confronted by Watts some time earlier when Watts had demanded a $1,500 payment to avoid Watts framing Griffin for possession of drugs.
As Griffin left the building, he was stopped by officer Kallat Mohammed, who was part of the Watts team of officers. Mohammed marched Griffin back to the lobby and solicited a bribe in return for Griffin’s release.
Griffin handed over $400. At that moment, Watts walked up, holding a bag of drugs. He asked Griffin if he knew the person who owned the drugs. When Griffin said he did not know, Watts ordered Griffin arrested for possession of the drugs — baggies of cocaine.
On November 29, 2007, Griffin pled guilty in Cook County Circuit Court to possession of cocaine. He was sentenced to two years in prison. Ultimately, he served more than two years in prison due to parole violations.
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 [Chicago Police Department] 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. That was the beginning of a years-long investigation of prosecutions engineered by Watts and his crew.
By 2024, nearly 200 tainted convictions had been dismissed.
On November 4, 2024, Griffin’s conviction was vacated, and the case was dismissed. On February 5, 2025, Griffin was granted a certificate of innocence, and he filed a claim for compensation from the state of Illinois Court of Claims.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 04-17-2025
Last Update Date: 04-17-2025
