Alexander Villa, convicted as one of the gunmen in the 2011 murder of Chicago Police officer Clifton Lewis was sentenced to life in prison Monday, but vowed to appeal his verdict and maintained he was framed by police and prosecutors.
“First and foremost, my condolences go out to the Lewis family, but I’m not the person that did this,” Villa said as he stood at the defense table before Judge James Linn handed down his sentence.
“I will fight this to the appellate court, I will fight this in the Supreme Court, but I know where I will never have to fight this, that’s in God’s court. He knows I’m innocent.”
The sentencing hearing comes nearly four years after Villa was convicted of gunning down Lewis during the armed robbery of a convenience store in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood, and just weeks after prosecutors dropped all charges against his two co-defendants ahead of a hearing on allegations of misconduct by prosecutors and detectives working on the case.
In the courthouse lobby after the hearing, Lewis’s three sisters said Villa’s sentence gave the family closure after more than a decade. Lewis had a daughter, and had proposed to his longtime girlfriend, Latrice Tucker, on Christmas morning 2011, just days before he was killed.
Tucker, who never married, died of cancer in June. Her wake took place the day prosecutors announced they were dropping the cases against alleged getaway driver Edgardo Colon and Tyrone Clay, charged as the second gunman in the fatal robbery. In court on Monday, Assistant State’s Attorney Kevin DeBoni read aloud a letter Tucker had written before her death.
“It was like she was there in the courtroom with us,” said Lewis’s sister, Lashana Lewis, told reporters. “She loved my brother dearly. ... I know they are together.”
When the police star of slain officer Clifton Lewis was retired in November 2021, both his fiancee, Latrice Tucker (left), and his mother, Maxine Lewis (right) were there. Tucker died in June.
Sun-Times file
Judge James Linn’s courtroom was packed, half with Villa’s supporters and wrongful conviction activists, half with uniformed Chicago police officers. The hearing, coming after more than a decade of litigation, was relatively brief. Linn, who presided over Villa’s trial in 2019, on Friday had denied a request by Villa’s lawyers to overturn the verdict. Two years ago, a new set of lawyers handling Villa’s sentencing subpoenaed a new batch of records and made information requests for still more CPD files. Villa attorney Jennifer Blagg described those records as a “treasure trove” of evidence that detectives had hidden from Villa’s trial team — information that showed all three men were innocent.
Linn referenced Blagg’s lengthy briefs seeking a new trial — Blagg filed three such motions, each longer than 100 pages and alleging new categories of missing evidence — but said the records he reviewed in the case would not have changed the outcome of Villa’s trial. Blagg said a map the FBI created using cellphone data shortly after the shooting showed that Villa, Colon and Clay were not at the crime scene when Lewis was shot, but that map was never turned over to Villa’s trial attorney, and the data used to create the map was lost by CPD.
The CPD-FBI dragnet, dubbed by police as “Operation Snake Doctor” led to more than 100 arrests targeting members of the Spanish Cobras gang, but records from the probe were kept separate from the Lewis murder investigation and never provided to the defense, Blagg said.
As he handed down the sentence, Linn noted the massive set of Snake Doctor files he reviewed included evidence of other crimes that would have had a negative impact on his sentence — except that Villa already faced a mandatory life term because of the conviction on the first-degree murder charges.
In the courthouse lobby, Blagg noted Villa’s co-defendants, Clay and Colon, both had confessed after lengthy interrogations — statements ultimately tossed out by judges — and had gone free. Villa, arrested days after the murder, refused to confess, was released and not re-arrested in the Lewis case until nearly two years after the shooting.
Security video from inside the convenience store was played repeatedly for the jurors at Villa’s trial, showing two gunmen burst into the store and open fire on Lewis, who ducked behind a counter after returning fire. One of the men, identified as Villa, leapt over the counter and shot Lewis multiple times before taking the officer’s gun. Lewis lived near the store, and had taken a job there to make extra money for his wedding.