For months, prosecutors say, a group of men targeted Ronald Givens, trying to persuade him to lie to authorities in a Baltimore case involving alleged drug and gun violations.
Givens refused, prosecutors said. On an October evening in 2011, a few weeks before he was scheduled to testify, Givens, 55, was shot to death on his lawn in the Gwynn Oak area of Baltimore County.
More than three years later, attorneys gave opening statements Thursday in a trial in Baltimore County Circuit Court of two of the men accused of conspiring to kill Givens. Clifford Carroll Butler, 23, and Derius Donald Duncan, 25, face first-degree murder, witness intimidation, conspiracy and firearm charges. If convicted on the murder charge, they could be sentenced to life without parole.
Neither is accused of pulling the trigger, but prosecutors say they plotted to kill Givens.
"They were the ones who pulled the strings," said Thiru Vignarajah, a deputy attorney general who was assigned as a special assistant state's attorney in the case. "The law and the facts of this case make no distinction ... between the people pulling the strings and the man who pulled the trigger."
Vignarajah, who started on the case when he was head of the major investigations unit at the Baltimore state's attorney's office, outlined the prosecution's theory to jurors. Prosecutors say Givens, who worked as an unlicensed hack driver, witnessed the arrest of Duncan, who was his passenger one night in Southwest Baltimore in March 2011.
Prosecutors contend Duncan placed a handgun in Givens' glove compartment when they were stopped by police that evening, worried that a firearms charge would send him to prison for years because he was on probation. They allege that while Duncan was incarcerated in Baltimore, he communicated with Butler and another man, Keyon Beads.
First, the men tried to bribe Givens with drugs and money, Vignarajah said. When that didn't work, he said, they conspired to kill him, recruiting David Johnson. Vignarajah said recordings of jailhouse calls and other evidence would prove the state's case.
Johnson, the alleged gunman, is scheduled to stand trial in July on first-degree murder and other charges. Beads, who pleaded guilty to charges that included conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in a plea agreement, is set to testify in Butler's and Duncan's trial.
Butler's attorney, Roland Brown, said jurors would find "holes in the state's case," pointing to a lack of physical evidence.
"My client had nothing to do with this murder," Brown said.
Attorney Leslie Stein, representing Duncan, said jurors would not be able to trust Beads' testimony and emphasized that there were no eyewitnesses to the shooting.
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