Add group to favorites
Back to post list
Send new message to group Search:
Post Subject:
Rapper Remy Ma gets 8 years for shooting friend
Rapper Remy Ma gets 8 years for shooting friend
* w w w .reuters . com /article/domesticNews/idUSN1340878120080513
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Grammy-nominated rapper Remy Ma was sentenced to
eight years in prison on Tuesday for shooting and wounding an
acquaintance after discovering money was missing from her purse after a
night out in Manhattan.
In sentencing the rapper, criminal court judge Rena Uviller said Remy
Ma, whose real name is Remy Smith, was "an extremely angry young woman
whose anger is completely out of control."
In March, a New York jury found Smith, nominated for a 2004 Grammy for
her part in Terror Squad's song "Lean Back," guilty of assault, weapons
possession and attempted coercion.
Smith's lawyer, Ivan Fisher, called the shooting in the early hours of
July 14, 2007, accidental and suggested the victim, Makeda
Barnes-Joseph, was exaggerating the facts to win a large sum in a
separate civil suit.
Smith believed her friend had taken $3,000 from her and that her gun
went off as the pair struggled over her purse. The bullet pierced
Barnes-Joseph's colon and hit her rectum and sent her to a hospital for
three weeks.
In appealing for leniency, Smith tearfully described how she had grown
up in homeless shelters, "surrounded by poverty and drugs and violence
and failure."
"Remy Ma is not even close to who I really am. I'm not a thug," she
said. "I'm not a threat or a menace to society, and I still have so much
to offer."
But prosecutor Michael McIntosh said that Smith had a habit of traveling
with a loaded weapon and said something like this "was bound to happen
one day."
The sentence was read aloud to a packed courtroom, including the
rapper's fiance, the rapper Papoose.
Smith and Papoose had planned to marry yesterday at New York's Rikers
Island jail, but the ceremony was canceled after a handcuff key was
discovered on Papoose, officials said.
After the sentencing, as Smith's friends and family gathered outside the
courtroom, Papoose had to be restrained as he lurched at one of the 15
court officers who had been stationed in the courtroom.
In a phone interview from prison last week on the satellite radio show
with New York DJ Kay Slay, Smith said she was innocent and that there is
a "whole conspiracy against rappers right now."
"Don't be mistaken by a jury that was not my peers. Like, there was not
tan, dark brown, black, nothin' on that jury," she said.
* w w w .reuters . com /article/domesticNews/idUSN1340878120080513
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Grammy-nominated rapper Remy Ma was sentenced to
eight years in prison on Tuesday for shooting and wounding an
acquaintance after discovering money was missing from her purse after a
night out in Manhattan.
In sentencing the rapper, criminal court judge Rena Uviller said Remy
Ma, whose real name is Remy Smith, was "an extremely angry young woman
whose anger is completely out of control."
In March, a New York jury found Smith, nominated for a 2004 Grammy for
her part in Terror Squad's song "Lean Back," guilty of assault, weapons
possession and attempted coercion.
Smith's lawyer, Ivan Fisher, called the shooting in the early hours of
July 14, 2007, accidental and suggested the victim, Makeda
Barnes-Joseph, was exaggerating the facts to win a large sum in a
separate civil suit.
Smith believed her friend had taken $3,000 from her and that her gun
went off as the pair struggled over her purse. The bullet pierced
Barnes-Joseph's colon and hit her rectum and sent her to a hospital for
three weeks.
In appealing for leniency, Smith tearfully described how she had grown
up in homeless shelters, "surrounded by poverty and drugs and violence
and failure."
"Remy Ma is not even close to who I really am. I'm not a thug," she
said. "I'm not a threat or a menace to society, and I still have so much
to offer."
But prosecutor Michael McIntosh said that Smith had a habit of traveling
with a loaded weapon and said something like this "was bound to happen
one day."
The sentence was read aloud to a packed courtroom, including the
rapper's fiance, the rapper Papoose.
Smith and Papoose had planned to marry yesterday at New York's Rikers
Island jail, but the ceremony was canceled after a handcuff key was
discovered on Papoose, officials said.
After the sentencing, as Smith's friends and family gathered outside the
courtroom, Papoose had to be restrained as he lurched at one of the 15
court officers who had been stationed in the courtroom.
In a phone interview from prison last week on the satellite radio show
with New York DJ Kay Slay, Smith said she was innocent and that there is
a "whole conspiracy against rappers right now."
"Don't be mistaken by a jury that was not my peers. Like, there was not
tan, dark brown, black, nothin' on that jury," she said.
