Clarissa Glenn’s troubles with the law began on Mother’s Day, 2004, when she was on her way to the Pancake House with her three sons—Ben, Jr., Gerard, and Deon. They left their apartment in the Ida B. Wells Homes, a housing project on the South Side of Chicago, to meet her partner, Ben Baker, outside the building. They found him talking with a police sergeant named Ronald Watts, a notorious figure in the project. Watts oversaw a team of police officers who were supposed to be rooting out the project’s drug trade, but he was in fact running his own “criminal enterprise,” as another officer later put it. Watts extorted money from drug dealers and other residents, and when they didn’t pay him he fabricated drug charges against them. That morning, Ben said, the sergeant had tried to shake him down. Ben told him, “Man, fuck you. Do your motherfucking job,” before walking away.

Clarissa and Ben, who were both in their early thirties, had been together since they were teen-agers. For seven years, they had lived with their sons in the Wells, as the project was known. Ben had grown up there and was used to dealing with hostile, sometimes corrupt officers, but Clarissa, whose father had been a private detective, expected better treatment from the police. In the months after Ben’s confrontation with Watts, whenever she saw a police officer talking to Ben she intervened, marching up to the officer and saying, “What’s going on?” One time, as Clarissa approached, an officer said to Ben, “Here comes your lawyer.”

On the afternoon of March 23, 2005, Clarissa saw from a window in their apartment that several officers had detained Ben, and she followed them to the police station. According to the police report, the officers had caught Ben with packets of heroin in one hand and packets of crack cocaine in his pocket. Prosecutors charged him with drug possession with intent to sell. Ben, who was unemployed and watched the boys after school, had a history of selling drugs, and he was three weeks away from finishing a two-year probation sentence for a drug case. If he was convicted of the new charges, he faced up to sixty years in prison. On April 2nd, he was released from jail pending trial. Clarissa, who worked as an administrator at a home-health-care agency, picked him up.

Ben said that Watts had framed him. Clarissa believed him, and so did his lawyer, Matthew Mahoney, who had represented him in a previous case, and had worked in the nineties as a prosecutor in the public-corruption unit at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. In May, Mahoney accompanied Clarissa and Ben to the state’s attorney’s office, where they met with two police sergeants, an agent from the Chicago Police Department’s internal-affairs division, and a prosecutor named David Navarro. Clarissa and Ben assumed that the authorities would be surprised to hear about Watts’s conduct, but they held up one photo after another of Watts’s team. “It was, like, Do you know who this is? Do you know who this is?” Clarissa recalled. “They were already investigating.”

The state’s attorney’s office opened an investigation into Watts after Mahoney informed the office of Ben’s case. The police department was known for consistently failing to address officer misconduct. In the previous two years, although the department had received at least twenty-five complaints about Watts and his team—including allegations that they planted drugs on people—it allowed them to continue working in the Wells. Mahoney described the internal-affairs division as “notoriously, incredibly slow in doing anything—and they’re incredibly full of leaks.” As a prosecutor, he said, he never knew whether “they’re going to leak your investigation to the target.”

Shaun James (left) and Taurus Smith insisted that officers planted drugs on them when they were arrested in 2004. Last year, a judge threw out their convictions. Photograph by Zora J. Murff for The New Yorker

That summer and fall, Watts continued to harass Ben and Clarissa. In October, Clarissa visited the police department’s Office of Professional Standards twice to file complaints. According to police records, she reported that Watts “entered and searched her house on several dates without justification,” and “threatened to take her to jail.” (Watts, through an attorney, declined to be interviewed for this article.) Clarissa did not know it at the time, but the police department did not protect the identities of citizens who filed complaints. Instead, before interviewing officers, the department told them the name of the complainant.

One Sunday in December, Ben was at home, planning to watch the Bears play the Steelers, when Clarissa called, asking him to pick her up at her aunt’s house. Returning home, as they drove into the parking lot next to the Wells, Watts and one of his officers pulled up behind them. They demanded Ben’s keys, and started searching the car. Finally, Watts reached inside the driver’s-side door and shouted, “I got it!” Clarissa said she saw Watts take something out of his sleeve, and she and Ben both recalled what Watts said next: “Put the cuffs on him—and you can lock her ass up, too.”

Both Ben and Clarissa were charged with drug possession with intent to sell. Clarissa had never been arrested before, and set out to prove that she and Ben had been framed. That turned out to be far more difficult than she had expected. Ben was convicted and imprisoned, while Clarissa reluctantly pleaded guilty in exchange for a probation sentence. During the next ten years, she struggled to raise their sons alone, suffered from depression, and at times was unemployed. But she kept at it, and her and Ben’s efforts started a chain of events that, last fall, led the state’s attorney’s office to dismiss the convictions of fifteen men who had been arrested by Watts’s team. The director of the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit told reporters, “The police were not being truthful,” and “in good conscience we could not see these convictions stand.”

Joshua Tepfer, an attorney at the University of Chicago Law School’s Exoneration Project, has represented Ben since 2015. He called the dismissal of the convictions “the first mass exoneration in Cook County history.” As cities across the country reckon with cases of police misconduct and corruption going back years, judges have begun to throw out large groups of convictions. In 2014, Philadelphia police officers were indicted on charges that included robbing and assaulting citizens, leading prosecutors to seek the dismissal of more than a thousand convictions. After Baltimore police officers were indicted on racketeering charges last year, judges threw out about three hundred convictions; more than a thousand other cases are under review. In Chicago, Tepfer believes that Watts and his officers wrongly arrested hundreds of people. He now represents sixty-three of them, and he is hopeful that there will be at least one more round of exonerations this year. “Clarissa is the lifeblood of this movement,” Tepfer said. “She started it ten years ago, and tried to report it so many ways, and tried so many times to save her family’s life.”

The Ida B. Wells Homes were Chicago’s first housing project for African-Americans. Named after the South Side’s investigative journalist and anti-lynching crusader, the project opened in 1941, promising decent, affordable housing and a path to middle-class life to families that had left the South during the Great Migration. By the end of the first year, sixteen hundred families lived in row houses and walkups spread across nearly fifty acres, with a field house, a large park, and a community center.