photo by: Mugshot courtesy of the Kansas Department of Corrections

Ronald D. Walters is pictured with the Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center.

A Lawrence man who was accused of going on a violent rampage with a hammer and a Jeep last spring pleaded no contest on Wednesday in Douglas County District Court to felony criminal threat and now faces more than a year in prison.

Ronald Dwayne Walters, 51, was originally charged with multiple felonies, including aggravated battery, criminal threat and aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, after an incident on April 28 at a rural residence near Eudora that reportedly began over a borrowed saw and escalated into Walters allegedly beating another man with a ball peen hammer, threatening to kill two men, damaging property and attempting to run over individuals with his car, including two law enforcement officers, as the Journal-World reported.

Some of those charges were dropped after witnesses failed to show up for Walters’ preliminary hearing on June 12, and others fell away as part of a plea deal that ultimately settled on a single charge of criminal threat.

In the plea agreement the parties are jointly recommending that Walters, who has the highest possible criminal history score, serve 16 months in prison. They have also agreed to make no requests to Judge Amy Hanley to depart from that recommendation when she sentences Walters on Nov. 13.

According to court records, Walters has numerous other convictions through the years for multiple misdemeanor battery and felony battery charges in Douglas and Franklin counties.