Villa was sentenced to life in prison after Chicago P.D. and Cook Co. prosecutors conspired to wrongfully convict him in the shooting death of Officer Clifton Lewis in 2011.
CHICAGO—Clifton Lewis, 41, a decorated eight-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, was working his second job as a security guard for a West Side convenience store when he was shot to death in a robbery on December 29, 2011. He was a well-liked officer—with an 11-year-old daughter and a longtime girlfriend to whom he had become engaged only four days earlier—and his murder inspired the traditional reactions and rituals of a city that values its heroes: the newspaper tributes; the flag-draped coffin; the streets lined with hundreds of officers in their dress blues; the five-figure reward for information being offered; and the speeches from politicians and senior officials guaranteeing justice.
“I promise that we will not tire until we find and hold those responsible for this senseless act,” then Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said. “Oh, we’re gonna get ‘em.”
A decade later, it would become clear how determined the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office were to close the case by any means necessary, and how badly they failed Officer Lewis and their duty to the truth. Three men were arrested and charged in Lewis’s killing: Tyrone Clay, Edgardo Colon, and Alexander Villa. But by October of last year charges had been dropped against all three men, after their attorneys brought to light evidence of a massive conspiracy of police and prosecutorial misconduct.
Yesterday, attorneys for Alexander Villa—the last man exonerated in Lewis’s death, after nearly a decade in prison—filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf against the City of Chicago, Cook County, and nearly 40 individual law enforcement officers he says decided to frame him and the other men instead of catching the real killers.
“It’s sad for both sides, and I just wish they would’ve got the right people to give [Lewis’s] family the closure they need,” Mr. Villa told ABC News upon his exoneration in October. “But incarcerating an innocent man, there’s no justice in that.”
Chicago defense attorney Jennifer Blagg worked for years to overturn the wrongful convictions of the three men, and in the process unearthed what the complaint calls “reams” of exculpatory evidence. According to the complaint, what that evidence shows is a wide-ranging conspiracy to manufacture a case and suppress the truth, a scheme so deliberate and determined that the defendants gave it a name: “Operation Snake Doctor.”
As the lawsuit contends, detectives coerced false statements and fabricated confessions implicating Villa and the other two suspects through prolonged and brutal interrogations. One supposed eyewitness—who later recanted his statement under oath—was a diabetic who had to be taken to the hospital twice during his several days of interrogation. Colon and Clay—the latter of whom was only 19, and had serious intellectual disabilities—only implicated themselves and Villa after several days of intense police pressure, lies, and coercion, conducted without attorneys present. Mr. Villa was also interrogated over a period of several days, but continually told the truth—that he was completely innocent—even after being physically abused so badly he was coughing up blood.
Unable to secure a false confession from Mr. Villa, the lawsuit contends, the detectives were still determined to frame him. As part of their conspiracy of intimidation, they rounded up more than a hundred people with relationships to the suspects, particularly members of the Spanish Cobras, a gang to which police believed Mr. Villa was connected. In addition to coercing false statements from these arrestees implicating Mr. Villa, the police spread the word that Mr. Villa was responsible for the harassment of the Spanish Cobras, purposely putting his life in danger. (When Mr. Villa was stabbed by Spanish Cobras, in apparent retaliation, emails show high-ranking CPD officials credited Operation Snake Doctor for the attempt on his life.)
There was never any physical evidence linking Mr. Villa to the murder or robbery. And, the complaint alleges, police and prosecutors conspired to hide and suppress evidence that would have proven his innocence. Cell phone tower maps provided by the FBI showed that the three men were nowhere near the scene of the crime at the time of the shooting, and nowhere near each other. But, instead of introducing this evidence, Assistant State’s Attorneys named in the complaint hid it from the court, and instead fabricated phony maps that implicated Mr. Villa and the other two men.
“Even in a department as notoriously corrupt as the Chicago P.D., it is shocking that detectives and prosecutors cared so little about the truth when investigating the murder of one of their own,” says attorney Jordan Poole, of the civil rights law firm of Loevy + Loevy, which represents Mr. Villa. “Officer Lewis’s family deserves for the people who really killed him to be brought to justice. Our client, Alexander Villa, deserves for the people who framed him to be held accountable. And the people of Chicago deserve a criminal justice system that doesn’t commit conspiracy to close cases.”
Both Clay and Colon eventually had their confessions suppressed. Yet Colon and Villa were both convicted at separate trials, based on the fabricated evidence. Colon did more than 10 years in prison, before being exonerated. Clay spent nearly 12 years in jail awaiting trial, before all charges against him were dropped. Mr. Villa was wrongfully imprisoned for more than eight years, suffering significant physical and emotional pain, including the death of his 14-year-old son while he was incarcerated. He was finally exonerated in October of 2024.
Mr. Villa’s lawsuit names as defendants the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the Village of Franklin Park, as well as three former Cook County Assistant State’s Attorneys and nearly forty former and current law enforcement officers with the Chicago P.D., Franklin Park P.D., and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Many of the individual defendants, the complaint argues, have a well-established history of misconduct, including allegations of fabricating reports, suppressing evidence, and coercing false confessions. Collectively, the defendant officers have been named in over a dozen civil lawsuits related to misconduct, costing the city tens of millions of dollars.
Assistant State’s Attorney Nancy Adduci, named in the complaint, was fired in the wake of mounting evidence of misconduct, and her colleague Andrew Varga abruptly retired before the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office vacated Villa’s convictions. Both had been scheduled to testify under oath about the misconduct allegations before the CCSAO dropped all charges against Colon and Clay in 2023.
Upon dismissing all charges against Mr. Villa in 2024, Cook Co. State’s Attorney Kim Foxx issued a statement. “Prosecutors have the responsibility to not only find justice for the harmed but also uphold the constitutional rights of the accused,” she said. “In this instance, we fell short. We are actively working to learn from the chain of events that has led us to this point so that we can make necessary improvements to our systems and ensure this does not happen again.”
Mr. Villa’s attorneys say this lawsuit is a vital part of that process of ensuring that what happened to him does not continue to be business as usual for Chicago law enforcement.
“No one can pay Mr. Villa back for what he has been through, and Officer Lewis’s family may never find justice for their loss,” says Blagg. “And the City of Chicago taxpayers continue to pay for the CPD’s refusal to change a well-documented pattern of misconduct that goes back decades. Meanwhile, the CPD promotes and rewards the officers that engage in the misconduct, resulting in a never-ending cycle of wrongful convictions.”
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For a copy of the complaint in this case, click here.
