From his Baltimore jail cell this summer, Ray "Lucky" Williams penned a thank you note to the woman who was supposed to testify against him in a murder trial.

When she didn't show up to court in July, her absence helped to foster enough indecision among jurors to cause a mistrial. And, for that, Williams was grateful.

"In any event, all's well that ends well," Williams wrote to her in a letter dated July 28, as he awaited a retrial. "Thanks for not betraying me."

But Williams, 45, had also written to a friend named "Big Irvin." More sinister in tone, this note highlighted the stubborn problem of witness intimidation in Baltimore and its chilling effect on the criminal justice system. His writings also prompted prosecutors to charge him with another crime: witness intimidation.

"I need you to get the word out," he told Big Irvin in the note that is now part of his court file. "[She] made a 16-page statement telling on everybody in Pig Town and Poe Homes!!! Holler at [her] and tell her to either not appear in court or to change her story if she does."

Three years after Baltimore drew national attention with the release of the street-produced DVD Stop Snitching, witness intimidation remains one of the biggest impediments to solving and successfully prosecuting homicides and shootings in the city and beyond.

Changes to state law have helped authorities battle the problem, but a street culture labeling those who cooperate with police and prosecutors as "rats" and "snitches" remains.

"It's a problem that, for the moment, appears to be here to stay," said city Circuit Judge John M. Glynn, chief judge of the criminal division.

This year alone in the Baltimore area, at least three people have been killed in shootings that police believe were calculated efforts to silence a witness. In July, a few months before he was to testify in a city murder trial, witness Carl Stanley Lackl Jr., 38, was gunned down in front of his Baltimore County home.

"I love my son, and he died a horrible death," said Lackl's mother, Marge Shipley. "My family is very broken."

The less-lethal - and more common - forms of intimidation range from spray-painted graffiti to stare-downs in the courtroom.

About a week ago, a home in Northwest Baltimore was ransacked and vandalized, the words "snitch" and "rat" spray-painted all over the walls. The couple who lived there told police that vandals intended to intimidate their daughter; she was a co-defendant in a robbery case and someone may have feared she was cooperating with police.

Following the publicity generated by the Stop Snitching DVD in late 2004, the General Assembly passed legislation that doubled the potential prison sentence for intimidating a witness and made it possible for prosecutors to put in evidence the tape-recorded statements of witnesses who have gone missing.

Those reforms have produced some real results. In the two years that the law has been on the books, city prosecutors have charged about 175 witness-intimidation cases and used or threatened to use the provision for playing taped statements of absent witnesses in several major cases.

In July, a Baltimore drug dealer was sentenced to 20 years in prison - the maximum penalty - for firing a gunshot into the Reservoir Hill home of a woman who had called the police on him. And in May, a city judge ruled that prosecutors could play for jurors the tape-recorded statement of a reluctant witness even if he didn't show up to testify. The witness came to court after all, and the defendant was convicted.

In many other cases, however, the legislation hasn't generated such ideal outcomes for prosecutors.

Two women who drove a witness in an attempted-murder case to the Police Department so that she could recant her statement were sentenced this week to time served. And city prosecutors' first use of the expanded witness intimidation law was for naught: Murder defendant Tyrone Beane was acquitted in July last year even though jurors heard a taped statement of the absent star witness.

"We didn't figure the law was going to solve the entire problem," said Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy, who for years prodded the legislature to take witness intimidation seriously. "But it gives us an additional tool to use."

Police and prosecutors said they have used other tools, too. The police countered Stop Snitching with a video called Keep Talkin'. Jessamy said she and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings recently taped a public service announcement pleading for residents who have witnessed crime to come forward and cooperate.

Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, have handled some of the most serious cases involving witness intimidation.

Last week, two Frederick County men were charged with killing someone who had been subpoenaed in a federal drug investigation.

"Cases involving witness intimidation should be our top priority," said Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. "Anytime anybody tries to interfere with witnesses giving truthful testimony, it threatens the foundation of the criminal justice system."

Defense attorneys have said that prosecutors are too quick to blame acquittals and bad cases on intimidation.

Warren A. Brown, a longtime criminal defense attorney, said witnesses often are more intimidated by the criminal justice system than by any one defendant.

"You're asking witnesses to cooperate with a system that has perennially been an adversary to them," he said.

"They start thinking about how they live in the same neighborhood as the defendant, how the state can't offer much protection. And there's a feeling that, even if they do testify, they're not going to be appreciated."

Brown and Glynn both said that no law can get at the root of witness intimidation: the community's lack of faith that the system will work.

"It's a societal problem, not a legal problem," Glynn said. "There's a price to pay when a large segment of the community has been criminalized. They feel alienated and unwilling to participate."

Police and prosecutors said they have ways to assist witnesses - from in-town relocation to police protection.

But the push to get witnesses to court can engender even more ill will. On any given day, dozens of Baltimore residents are jailed on "body attachments" - a way to ensure that they will come to court, albeit in handcuffs and shackles.

For more than a month, the witness in Williams' case has been behind bars, after a judge decided to hold her until the retrial, which is scheduled for early next month. (The Sun is not naming her because of the fears for her safety.)

Williams is accused of fatally stabbing 53-year-old Charles Sparrow at his home in Southwest Baltimore in April of last year.

In his letters from jail, Williams wrote that those who told police he had confessed to the crime were lying.

When the witness was arrested on a body attachment and charged with violating probation in her drug case, she turned over letters Williams had written to her.

The judge who locked her up may have been worried that she'd take Williams' thank you note to heart. In it, Williams urged her to skip court again - and to persuade another witness to follow suit.

He wrote: "If you and the other witness don't show on this occasion, it's likely my case would be thrown out."

julie.bykowicz@baltsun.com

Witness intimidation in the news

Two Frederick County men were indicted this month on federal witness-tampering charges in the death of a 20-year-old man who had been subpoenaed in a drug investigation.

Steven Stone, 23, and Jessie Dorsz, 26, are accused of shooting David Lee of Frederick in July, a month after he was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury.

Carl Stanley Lackl Jr., the main witness in a Baltimore murder case, was gunned down in front of his Baltimore County home in July. Patrick Byers, 22, is charged in both slayings.

The case in which Lackl was to be the key witness, the March 2006 shooting death of Larry Haynes, has been postponed until January. Byers was arraigned this month in Baltimore County in Lackl's death. Several others, including Marcus Pearson, 26, accused of shooting Lackl, also have been charged.

Baltimore witness John Dowery, 38, was shot to death near his old East Baltimore home on Thanksgiving last year. Dowery was expected to be a witness in a federal drug case. He was shot once and survived and then moved out of town as part of federal witness protection. But he was killed while visiting his family in his old neighborhood.

Several people have been charged federally in the shooting that Dowery survived; city police and the FBI are investigating whether his killing was related to his being a federal witness.

Omar Parker, 28, was sentenced in July in Baltimore Circuit Court to 20 years in prison for a felony intimidation conviction. A Reservoir Hill woman had been reporting to police the drug activity near her home, and in May 2005 someone fired a gunshot into her bedroom window.

Months later, a man she identified as Parker approached her and said, according to charging documents, "[Expletive], keep calling the police and I'm gonna shoot you. And I'll shoot your windows out like I did before."

LeShawn Green, 25, of Baltimore was convicted in May of first-degree murder, even though a witness whom he had encouraged to "keep duckin' and dodgin'" changed his story during the trial. Green was sentenced to life plus 95 years in prison.

Terry Nelson, 22, of Baltimore was convicted in April of first-degree murder, even though the main witness - whom Nelson said his brother would be "beating on" as a way to silence him - changed his story during the trial. Nelson was sentenced to life plus 40 years in prison.

Two women were sentenced last week to time served after pleading guilty to intimidating a witness in an attempted-murder case. Court documents state that Janice Jones, 27, and Dakia Frazier, 23, drove a witness to the Baltimore Police Department's Eastern District station in August and ordered her to tell the police that she had lied. The witness burst into tears inside the station and admitted that she had been forced to come there.

Last month, a Baltimore man received a life sentence after being convicted of shooting a witness to prevent him from testifying in a city murder trial.

Myron Gladney, 21, was found guilty of the April 6, 2005, shooting of Stephen Arrington - a man who had been scheduled to testify in the murder trial of Gladney's brother. Arrington survived and testified against Anthony Gladney; a jury acquitted him.

In August, a Waverly woman who kept calling the police to report drug activity found that the word "rat" had been painted on her house. Weeks later, someone threw a firebomb at her house. She escaped uninjured.

The Waverly case recalled two of the city's most brazen instances of witness intimidation: The 2005 firebombing of longtime Harwood community activist Edna McAbier and the 2002 East Baltimore firebombing that killed Angela Dawson and her five children. The couple had routinely called police to report drug activity.

McAbier testified against her attackers, helping secure long federal prison sentences for each of them. Darrell L. Brooks pleaded guilty in federal court to the Dawson firebombing and is serving a life sentence without parole.

Baltimore men Yusef Winston-Bey, 28, and Victor Shuron, 30, are charged with witness intimidation and attempted murder in the Nov. 27, 2006, shooting of a witness in a Baltimore County homicide.

Their trial last month ended in a mistrial after a juror told the judge that two men who had been watching the trial approached her at a bus stop. Their retrial is scheduled for December.

See also: baltimoresun.com/witness