EX-CITY POLICEMAN GETS 6 1/2 YEARS

Former St. Louis police Officer Reginald A. Williams was sentenced Friday
to 6 1/2 years in prison for falsely claiming he found drugs on two men in
2001 and preparing a bogus police report about it.

Williams, called a "renegade cop" by prosecutors, sent an innocent man to
prison in the 2001 arrest, while his report meant the guilty went free,
prosecutor David Rosen said in urging a stiff sentence. Williams made other
bogus arrests in which he stole money from his victims and even ran up a
bill on an arrested man's cell phone, Rosen said.

Defense attorney Craig Kessler urged probation, saying Williams helped
children by coaching them in boxing and fighting crime. "He's an officer
who went back to where he came from and worked the streets to clean up his
neighborhood."

U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry told Williams that while he may acted
from a "misguided sense of justice," believing the men were drug dealers,
he ignored the Constitution, which aims at "protecting citizens from
government abuse."

Williams, 44, of the 1300 block of Blackstone Avenue, declined to make a
statement in court.

At Kessler's request, Perry recommended that Williams be allowed to serve
his sentence at Eglin Air Force Base, a minimum-security prison camp in
Florida where convicted police officers are often sent.

A jury convicted Williams in April on three counts of obstruction of
justice and one of making a false statement to a federal prosecutor. He was
acquitted of two counts of violation of civil rights and one count of
possessing crack with intent to distribute it.

Dianna Williams, the defendant's wife, said her husband was prosecuted
because he had complained that the Police Department's process for
selecting sergeants is biased against African-Americans. "It's clearly a
political power issue that we will win on appeal," she said.

Rosen, an assistant U.S. attorney, said, "There is clear-cut evidence of
his involvement in the crime, and that's what this case is based upon."

Prosecutors said police got a tip on Aug. 14, 2001, that day-care center
worker Rolanda Watkins had crack cocaine in her purse. Williams found the
cocaine and arrested her. At a police station, she said she was holding it
for a man named Demetrius Childs.

When Childs went to pick up Watkins from work, Williams arrested him and a
companion, Curtis Brown-Bey.

Prosecutors said that Childs and Brown-Bey had no cocaine but that Williams
filed a false report saying they did, and wrongly attributing the seized
cocaine to them.

The case broke open after an officer who helped Williams make the arrest,
Terrell Carter, later told a federal prosecutor that he did not see cocaine
in the accused men's possession.

Childs, testifying under a grant of immunity, said the cocaine in Watkins'
possession belonged to him, but he said none of it was in his car when he
was arrested. He also testified that about $700 taken from him during the
arrest was never returned.

Charges against Watkins and Childs were ultimately dropped, although
Brown-Bey did go back to prison for a parole violation.

Rosen said the arrest was part of a pattern of bogus arrests by Williams.
"He wants a better-looking record, and he wants that drug money," Rosen said.