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That simple declarative sentence shouldn’t even be necessary, and yet it explains so much.

On Monday, with no fanfare, no announcement, no mea culpa, to prosecute Watson on bogus charges that stemmed from a summer day in the park playing basketball.

With a simple filing of nolle prosequi, prosecutor Lee Goodman dropped all nine charges that had been hanging over the veteran of the Navy and former defense contractor since Aug. 1, 2012.

I met Watson a little more than a year ago. He the story of the day when oft-troubled Ferguson police Officer Eddie Boyd arrested him while he was sitting in his car at Forestwood Park cooling off after a day of basketball.

He told me how Boyd wouldn’t let him get his driver’s license in the back seat, sitting under his folded clothes. How the city trumped up “failure to comply� charges when he complained of unfair treatment by Boyd. How the city entered a guilty plea on his behalf even though he and his attorneys say he never made one, and the city could provide no proof that he did.

He told me how his inability to get the bogus charges dropped led to his security clearance getting pulled. How he lost his six-figure job working at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as an information technology contractor.

He told me the same story that two years earlier who had come to Ferguson to investigate years of disparate treatment to black residents who reported being harassed by police and then jailed when the municipal court added fees upon fees on what began as penny ante municipal offenses.

I’ll never forget the look in Watson’s eyes as he stared me down when I asked if he had ever faced such harassment by police.

“I’m from here,� Watson told me. “I’m black.�

Today he’s free from the charges that had dogged him for years. He’s happy about that. But he hasn’t been made whole.

“They definitely could have done this years ago,� Watson said. “It doesn’t change any of the depression I went through. It doesn’t erase any of the days I was asleep in the back of my car or practically living out of a storage unit. It doesn’t change any of that.�

Watson went through two private attorneys before the nonprofit law firm took up his case. Former Ferguson prosecuting attorney Stephanie Karr fought Watson’s attempt to withdraw his guilty pleas. She lost. Then, after Karr resigned, a new prosecutor, Goodman, refiled the charges. The case was set for trial last week and was delayed.

Rather than lose, Goodman simply folded.

The case serves as a reminder that three years after the Ferguson protests shed light on widespread municipal court changes in St. Louis County, not much has changed.

“There is a narrative that there has been progress made in Ferguson and the municipal courts,� says Thomas Harvey, co-founder of ArchCity Defenders and one of Watson’s attorneys.

The Missouri Legislature passed Senate Bill 5, which caps the amount of revenue that can be collected in municipal courts from traffic revenue, but parts of the bill were found unconstitutional by the Missouri Supreme Court. That same court issued new rules that seek to make the municipal courts act more professionally and avoid becoming de facto debtor’s prisons, but most of what the court did reinforced existing law.

“There is nothing that has been implemented as a reform that wasn’t already required by Missouri law, local rule, or the constitution,� Harvey says.

A week ago, I wrote about , this one in Florissant, where a young man is seeking to get guilty pleas from years ago erased from his record. The entire time I was writing about Paul Schneider, the son of Florissant Mayor Thomas Schneider, I was thinking of Watson.

When the white son of the mayor has a problem with the law, his daddy expects to be able to pull the levers of power to his advantage. It didn’t quite work this time in the case of Schneider, and maybe, just maybe, Watson’s case had something to do with that.

Not everything about Watson’s case is related to race. The cop who arrested him is black. So is the new prosecutor. But they work in a system that still treats the sins of the past like apparitions.

For Watson, what passes for justice will likely come in some form of compensation, stemming from the federal civil rights lawsuit he has filed against Ferguson. But that won’t fix what he sees as an accountability problem in the municipal courts and police departments that affect mostly poor, black people who look like he does.

Watson wasn’t poor when he was arrested. Those resources, earned after a life of doing the right thing, of serving his country, of raising a family and living a life of discipline, allowed him to stage a five-year battle that he is closer than ever to winning.

“What about people who don’t have any means?� Watson asks. “Where is the accountability?�

For the first time in five years, Watson doesn’t have a legal cloud over his head. But he still has a question that he asks on behalf of his boys, the ones he pulled from private schools, the ones who joined him in sleeping on couches in basements of friends’ homes after he could no longer afford his own.

“Five years,� he says matter-of-factly. “Five years. How do I get my life back?�