Donald Rice, the intruder killed with a samurai sword in Oakenshawe just days after completing his most recent hitch in the Baltimore County Detention Center, was a longtime criminal who once aspired to be an attorney. He was 49 years old, with 29 career convictions, the first one 30 years ago. But that first one, he claimed, was a wrong one based on perjured testimony; it derailed his ambitions to practice law and set him on course to constantly break it.
Or so he wrote in a letter from jail last year.
"That sentence destroyed my life," Mr. Rice claimed, "because I would never recover - a great legal mind with goals of becoming an attorney. Attending Penn State University, then on to law school, all gone because of a lie. ... Dealing with the degradation of being sent to prison, I never overcame my despair and ended up being the product I was forced into by the penal system. Unable to lift myself out of the perilous state, it ultimately consumed me and I've never recovered ..."
JoAnna Allen, a retired Baltimore County schoolteacher, provided me with a copy of Mr. Rice's letter. She leads a meditation class in the detention center; Mr. Rice participated in the class last fall while serving an 18-month sentence for car theft. Ms. Allen got to know him during that time as a devout Muslim, a deeply troubled man but also deeply spiritual, older and wiser than the others in the jail. "He really was a good person, caught in an illegitimate way of making a living," she says. Ms. Allen encouraged Mr. Rice to write the letter after hearing him tell a story in her meditation class, and the story went like this:
One day in October, while awaiting an appearance in Baltimore County Circuit Court, Mr. Rice had a cellmate who was the state's key witness against a 23-year-old law student accused of killing a Woodlawn man, an aspiring rap artist, six years earlier.
The accused, an Eagle Scout and Mount St. Joseph High School graduate named Nicholas Dudley Pinderhughes Weaver, had been arrested at Adelphi University in New York and brought back to Towson for trial. He denied the charge and said he knew nothing about the murder.
On the day the trial was to begin, Donald Rice, sitting in a holding cell, engaged the witness in conversation. The young man appeared to be in distress.
