A Southwest Baltimore man who wrote notes, made threats and tried to arrange the poisoning of witnesses who were to testify at his murder trial pleaded guilty yesterday to murder and witness-intimidation charges and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Charles G. Bernstein acknowledged that Ray "Lucky" Williams' 30-year sentence, with all but nine years suspended, is "very, very lenient." Williams' previous trial ended with a hung jury, and the case against him was rife with difficulties common in Baltimore murder cases.
There was no witness to the crime, and most of the witnesses with knowledge of the fatal stabbing and Williams' subsequent attempts to avoid prosecution were scared, uncooperative and recovering or former drug addicts, Assistant State's Attorney Rita Wisthoff-Ito said.
Wisthoff-Ito said she had to jail three of her five key witnesses - bringing one of them back from Chicago - to ensure that they would testify had there been a trial. One key witness was a man charged with theft whom Williams met in the medical ward of the Baltimore City Detention Center, according to the inmate's statement to investigators.
"It's not perfect, but there [was] a substantial chance he'd get nothing if it went to trial," Bernstein said in an interview. "You have to remember the state's low batting average in Baltimore. The quality of the jurors, witnesses, police investigation and prosecution all come together to be us: Baltimore in 2008."
Wisthoff-Ito said that after the first trial, she interviewed jurors, who told her they had difficulty believing four of her witnesses, all of whom were women and drug addicts. Two of the women were housemates of Williams and the victim, 53-year-old Charles Sparrow, and were in the home when the stabbing occurred April 2006 in a second-floor bathroom during an argument over drugs.
"All of them were selling drugs out of the house, and people were coming in and out that day," Wisthoff-Ito said. "The defense had a good argument ... that other people could have done it."
Wisthoff-Ito said Williams, 46, tried to persuade two other women to get the housemates high on "bad drugs" on the day of the trial to prevent them from testifying.
According to a statement from the detention center inmate, Williams confessed to the killing, revealing the detail that the knife had broken and become lodged in the victim's back, which was later confirmed by a medical examiner.
