Dennis Williams worked as an informant for Officer Omar Abdullah of the Raleigh Police Department. He would identify potential suspects, and then Abdullah would obtain approval for Williams to conduct an undercover buy. Officers supplied Williams with audio and video equipment to capture these transactions.

On August 23, 2018, police arrested David Weaver for sale of cocaine and possession of cocaine within 1,000 feet of a public park. Williams told Abdullah that he had paid Weaver $40 for 2.8 grams of cocaine. After the arrest, Abdullah claimed in court papers, he found 36 grams of cocaine in a brown paper towel hidden in Weaver’s underwear, leading to additional charges including trafficking cocaine.

Sixteen months later, on January 22, 2020, Weaver pled guilty in Wake County Superior Court to cocaine trafficking, and received a sentence of between 35 months and 51 months in prison.

After Weaver’s plea, Abdullah and Williams worked together on 12 cases where Williams said that defendants had sold him heroin. A public defender noticed a pattern in these arrests; the defendants said they had never sold heroin. The laboratory tests reported that the substances tested negative for heroin. In some instances, the material turned out to be brown sugar, and prosecutors dismissed 11 of the cases.

The Wake County District Attorney’s Office began reviewing Abdullah’s files on these arrests. In some cases, there was no audio or video footage of Williams and the defendant conducting the transaction. In others, Williams shielded the camera, preventing a clear picture of what transpired.

The police department stopped using Williams as an informant on May 22, 2020, after a botched drug raid tied to information he provided to Abdullah. In September 2021, the City of Raleigh paid $2 million to the defendants who had filed suit against Abdullah and others for wrongful arrest on the heroin charges for substances that later tested negative.

The defendants included Curtis Logan, the only one who had not had his charges dismissed. He had pled guilty to possession of a counterfeit controlled substance, and he was exonerated on September 24, 2020. Weaver contacted the attorneys who had represented those defendants in their lawsuit. One of the attorneys, Abraham Rubert-Schewel, reviewed the video footage captured by Williams and logged into evidence. Weaver was not visible in the footage, and there was no audio or video evidence of a sale.

Weaver’s attorneys and prosecutors moved for appropriate relief on March 4, 2022. The motion said Williams had been found to be unreliable and the video did not independently corroborate the information Williams told Abdullah. Weaver completed his prison sentence on March 13, 2022. A judge granted the motion to vacate his conviction and a separate motion to dismiss the charge on March 14, 2022.

On June 15, 2022, Weaver filed a civil-rights lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina against Abdullah, other police officers, and the City of Raleigh. In the lawsuit, Weaver said he never sold Williams any cocaine, nor did he have any cocaine in his possession at the time of his arrest.

He noted that the price Williams allegedly paid for the 2.8 grams was a quarter of the street price, an indicator of the falsity of the purported drug deal. After his arrest, Weaver said in the lawsuit, Abdullah and officers found a small amount of marijuana and took him to a police substation. Weaver said Abdullah asked him to work as a confidential informant. He refused. Weaver said he was then strip-searched, and he could hear Abdullah tell another officer about planting the drugs in his underwear.

Weaver also said in the lawsuit that Abdullah and other officers violated department policies in their arrangement with Williams, failing to quickly process evidence, making payments without proper verification, and proceeding with arrests long after they knew Williams was bringing in fake drugs.

In July 2022, judges in Wake County District Court granted consent motions filed by the Wake County Public Defender and Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman to vacate convictions against five additional defendants whose arrests in 2019 and 2020 were also linked to Williams’s work with Abdullah. Their names are: William Blackwell, Raymond Burnette, Marcus Davis, Gregory Marshall, and Willie Robertson.

“Given the State’s determination following the entry of a guilty plea that the confidential informant cannot be relied upon and without additional corroborating evidence … the State believes it is in the interest of justice to vacate the judgments,” these motions said. “Had the State and Defendant known at the time of the Defendant’s plea that the Confidential Informant was not a reliable source, the Defendant would not have pled guilty and the State would have dismissed the charge.”

The police department fired Abdullah in October 2021. He has also been charged with providing false statements to a judicial official in connection with the May 2020 drug raid. Williams has been charged with five counts of obstruction of justice. Separately, the district attorney’s office dismissed charges against as many as 30 defendants whose cases had not been resolved.

— Ken Otterbourg