Maryland's highest court threw out Wednesday the murder conviction of a man accused of shooting his fiancee in the head more than a dozen years ago, the second time appellate judges have vacated a guilty verdict in the case, citing errors by prosecutors and the judge.
At Tony Williams' first trial in 1999, the state's attorney's office failed to disclose that a witness to whom the suspect confessed was a police informant, and the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial.
At the suspect's second trial in 2007, the appeals court has now ruled that the judge mistakenly allowed videotaped testimony from another witness who died before the second trial, after a detective disclosed that the woman was legally blind and might not have been able to see the shooting, as she had claimed in court.
Baltimore prosecutors have to decide whether to try Williams — who is now 43 and has been jailed since his arrest in March 1998 — a third time in the shooting death of 33-year-old Dana Rochelle Drake in the hallway of her apartment complex on Dartmouth Road. The Court of Appeals has now overturned two life sentences.
"We are reviewing the opinion and the case with an eye toward retrying it," said Joe Sviatko, a spokesman for the Baltimore state's attorney's office.
Gary Bair, one of two attorneys who argued Williams' case before the appeals court, said that "it is unusual to have retrials twice because of similar issues. … The bottom line is that it was an unfair trial for a jury to hear testimony from someone who was legally blind."
According to the Court of Appeals decision, the witness' condition emerged shortly before the second trial was to begin, in a pretrial hearing with Darryl Massey, a Baltimore police homicide detective who is now retired from the force.
Defense attorneys argued that because the witness, Brenda O'Carroll, had died, it would be unfair to allow jurors to hear her videotaped testimony because she could not be challenged on the new information about her poor eyesight
Then-Circuit Court Judge Albert J. Matricciani Jr. disagreed and allowed the entire tape to be played, saying Williams' lawyers could impeach her credibility in opening statements and closing arguments.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld that decision, which was overturned Wednesday by the judges on the high court. Two judges dissented, writing that Matricciani's attempts to remedy the errors gave defense council "full and fair opportunity to attack the credibility of Ms. O'Carroll."
Baltimore police arrested Williams a month after Drake was killed with two bullets fired from a .22-caliber handgun.
O'Carroll, who lived on the first floor of the apartment building, told police that from her bedroom window, she saw the suspect park his car on the right side of a street and chase Drake into the building while firing his gun. She then said that he "rode out like Speedy Gonzales" just before she opened her door and found Drake "on the steps with her head on the side, dead. There was blood on my door."
Police also had another witness, a drug suspect who was in the cell adjacent to Williams, who testified that Williams told him he was in debt and killed Drake for $100,000 in insurance money.
But at the first trial in 1999, prosecutors failed to tell the defense that this witness had worked for the police as a paid informant and was seeking a lighter sentence in exchange for his testimony. The witness had told jurors he was testifying "out of the goodness of his heart."
The Court of Appeals threw out that murder conviction and ordered a new trial. O'Carroll died and during a hearing before the second trial in 2007, Detective Massey disclosed for the first time that the key witness' sight had been impaired.
"She mentioned hearing, hearing things, part of her sickness, she was blind, whether it was legally, or — she was blind," Massey said during the hearing.
Matricciani allowed prosecutors to play a tape of her testimony from the 1999 trial, saying he saw "no evidence on the tape that she suffers from any disability, and she makes statements … that are accurate, such as the color and model of the car and that sort of thing."
A jury convicted Williams again.
On Wednesday, the Court of Appeals vacated that conviction as well. They ruled that the state's failure to reveal O'Carroll's medical condition before the first trial and the judge's decision to allow her taped testimony at the second trial was unfair to the accused.
Matricciani, who who now serves on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, declined to comment on the case Wednesday.