63 men released from prison over crooked Chicago cop's false arrests

Source: Chicago Tribune / Getty

10 More Released In “Mass Exoneration” Due To Crooked Chicago Cop

Former Chicago police officer Sgt. Ronald Watts was such a dirty piece of s#!t that a Cook County judge along with State’s Attorney Kim Foxx have freed yet another 10 men from imprisonment behind false arrests. According to the Chicago-Sun Times, those 10 newly released men bring the total number of freed inmates to 63…SIXTY-THREE!

Says Sean Starr of the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School:

“When the system fails one of us, it fails every single one of us,” Starr said at a news conference after a brief court hearing before Chief Criminal Court Judge LeRoy K. Martin Jr. “Their stories are just the latest examples of a calculated, feigned ignorance on behalf of the Chicago Police Department of the victimization of black and brown, lower-income communities in Chicago. As citizens of the city, we need to demand more, we need to demand accountability.”

In 2012 Watts and partner Kallatt Mohammed were caught and charged with stealing $5,000 from a federal informant who was recording the entire shakedown. That sting was set up because Watts and co. had been accused of targeting minorities living in the Ida B. Well housing projects for fugazi drugs busts and bogus arrests.

How did these phony-a$$ arrests affect the people who were imprisoned and their loved ones, you ask? Well, allow us to tell you:

Derrick Lewis, who twice was sent to prison after Watts’ officers planted drugs on him, spent a total of more than seven years in prison. The convictions made his then-fiancée question his character, and she left him for another man while he was locked up. Though both his arrests took place more than a decade ago, Lewis said he still suffers because of his time behind bars.

“We lost things that you can never get back,” said Lewis, who protested that he was innocent from the moment he was arrested. “We have a right to feel how we feel, now that it’s coming out that we were actually telling the truth.”

It’s an evil world we live in. SMFH.