On November 10, 2014, police officers in Chicago, Illinois, stopped 31-year-old Christopher Ellis on East 79th Street for an alleged seatbelt violation. Ellis presented his license and other information through a crack in the window of his car.
The officers said they suspected Ellis to be in possession of marijuana and asked to search his car. Ellis declined, pending the arrival of a supervisor. The situation escalated and ended with the officers pulling Ellis out of his car, using a taser on him, and handcuffing him on the ground.
Ellis was charged with two counts of resisting arrest and 12 counts of aggravated battery on a peace officer. The police impounded his car but did not find any marijuana.
Ellis’s bench trial in Cook County Circuit Court took place on April 20, 2017, before Judge Carol Howard. Officers James Hunt and Michael Wagner testified about the traffic stop and about what they said were the circumstances that led to Ellis’s arrest for battery and resisting arrest.
Ellis did not testify, and his attorney did not present any evidence.
On April 20, 2017, Judge Howard found Ellis guilty of two counts of aggravated battery on a peace officer and two counts of resisting arrest. She found him not guilty of the other 10 battery counts. Howard later sentenced Ellis to six years in prison on the battery convictions and a concurrent sentence of two years in prison on the resisting arrest convictions, with 327 days of credit for time Ellis spent in jail awaiting trial.
Ellis filed a direct appeal, which the Illinois Court of Appeals, First District dismissed on March 6, 2019. Ellis was released from prison on May 3, 2019.
While the appeal was pending, on December 27, 2018, Ellis filed a pro se petition for post-conviction relief. He said that his trial attorney had provided ineffective representation, failing to secure the testimony of Demetrius Ward, who said he saw the incident unfold in front of the store where he worked. “My lawyer [knew] about my witness, and he never tried to get him to come to court,” Ellis said. He also said video cameras on nearby Cottage Grove Avenue might have captured the incident.
An attorney with the Cook County Public Defender’s Office was assigned to represent Ellis in his post-conviction motions, but the case stalled during the COVID pandemic, and the attorney was unable to obtain an affidavit from Ward. Judge Howard dismissed Ellis’s petition on May 23, 2022.
Ellis then filed a motion to reconsider. At a hearing on July 12, 2022, the public defender asked to withdraw from the case because of health issues and have the court appoint Herschella Conyers, a law professor and director of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, to represent Ellis. Conyers was later joined by Craig Futterman, also a law professor at the University of Chicago, and Karl Leonard, an attorney with the Exoneration Project.
The court granted Ellis’s attorneys additional time to secure an affidavit from Ward and to investigate claims of previous misconduct by the officers involved in Ellis’s arrest. The attorneys said this evidence would have undermined the credibility of the officers’ testimony.
In a motion filed on June 30, 2023, Ellis’s attorneys filed a supplement to their motion to reconsider that included an affidavit from Ward, dated November 2, 2022.
Ward said in the affidavit: “At approximately 4:45 p.m. I saw blue lights which I believed were from Chicago police cars and I stepped outside to see what was happening. There were a lot of people outside. I saw a car parked in the same side of the street as the store and an unmarked police car behind it. I saw two Chicago police officers pull the man out of the car and shove him to the ground. They were on both sides of him and were on top of him. I learned much later that the man’s name was Christopher Ellis … I never saw Christopher Ellis resisting or fighting with the police.”
Ward said he told the officers that Ellis did not do anything to the police or resist arrest. He said that prior to Ellis’s trial, he spoke with a woman who identified herself as Ellis’s attorney but never met her in person.
The supplement said that Hunt and Wagner were the state’s only witnesses and their credibility and truthfulness had now been called into question. Hunt was one of 66 current and former Chicago police officers that the Cook County State’s Attorney placed on a “do-not-call” list because of problems with his past testimony. Separately, the Chicago Police Department tried unsuccessfully to fire Hunt in 2022 for his alleged misconduct during the 2020 demonstrations in Chicago after the death of George Floyd.
Hunt was also investigated and cleared in the shooting death of a 17-year-old boy in 2014. Four years later, a person recorded him on a cellphone video telling two men that “I kill mother-------.”
Wagner also had an extensive history of civilian complaints that alleged misconduct.
“It is beyond dispute that consideration of the supplemental evidence of Hunt’s and Wagner’s pattern of misconduct and the testimony of Mr. Ward would have likely changed the result at trial,” the supplement said.
Judge Howard held an evidentiary hearing, where three witnesses testified about alleged misconduct by the officers.
On July 15, 2025, Judge Howard vacated Ellis’s convictions. She said, “The Court concluded that the petitioners have established their burden, have established that it is more likely than not that if the evidence presented at the third-stage hearing had been presented at the trial, there would likely have been a different outcome.” She also said that Ellis’s trial attorney had been ineffective in failing to present this impeachment evidence against the officers as well as testimony by Ward.
The state dismissed the charges on November 14, 2025.
– Ken OtterbourgPosting Date: 12-11-2025
