Updated November 01, 2024 at 16:37 PM ET
The trial of Atlanta rapper Young Thug has ended in a guilty plea. Late in Thursday's proceedings, the 33-year-old artist, whose real name is Jeffrery Williams, changed his plea in the RICO case to guilty and no contest on several gang, gun and drug charges.
Following a dramatic series of events in what's become the longest-running criminal trial in Georgia, Williams is being sent home. The government's attorneys asked for a sentencing of 45 years — 25 in prison and 20 on probation — but Fulton County Judge Paige Reese Whitaker delivered a sentence that allowed Williams to go free immediately. "The total sentence is 40 years, to serve the first 5 years in prison but commuted to the time you've already served," she stated during the proceedings.
Williams had been in custody for more than two years, since initially being indicted in 2022. He will serve 15 years of probation, backloaded by a 20-year sentence that may be served in custody depending on his probation. He is also required to stay out of the metro Atlanta area for the first 10 years of his probation, barring certain guidelines, which include returning to the city to make a live anti-gang and anti-violence public presentation to children at a school or community organization several times a year. In the days leading up to Thursday's hearing, three of Williams' co-defendants had pleaded guilty in deals with the prosecution.
The guilty plea marks a dramatic conclusion to a case that put hip-hop on trial and rattled the music industry — and fans — to the core as prosecutors alleged that Williams' YSL affiliation not only denoted his label, Young Stoner Records, but also a criminal street gang he co-founded known as Young Slime Life. Critical to the prosecution's case were allegations that Williams used his own Billboard-charting music — as well as social media posts — to threaten rivals and further the dominance of the street gang. While the use of rap lyrics as criminal evidence precedes Williams' case, never has such a high-profile conviction come at the cost of a rapper's artistic merit.
The racial implication of using rap lyrics to secure criminal convictions is well-documented. "Across the country, in an alarming rate, young men of color are having their rap lyrics introduced as evidence in criminal cases," Erik Nielson, who studies African American literature and hip-hop, told NPR in 2020. "And no other musical form — no other fictional form, musical or otherwise, is used like this in courts."
From the start, the prosecution asserted that Young Thug lyrics — from such popular songs as "Just How It Is," "Original Slime Sh*t," "Halftime" and "Ski" with YSL signee Gunna — were proof of Williams' criminal intent, or worse, confessions of crimes he committed or ordered as rap rivalries turned into gang rivalries. "I never killed anybody / but I got something to do with that body," as he raps in "Anybody" featuring Nicki Minaj. While prosecutors built a case on interpreting lyrics like those as direct references to real-life crimes, Williams' defense lawyer, Brian Steel, argued before sentencing that the "Anybody" line was a figurative nod to his collaborator Nicki Minaj's body, not a criminal admission.
Such literal interpretations reveal an inherent bias, according to Nielson. "One of the reasons why people are willing to read those lyrics as autobiography is because they map to commonly held stereotypes about the inherent criminality of young Black and young Hispanic men," he says. "I also think that many people have a difficult time believing that these young men are capable of learning and mastering a highly sophisticated, complex art form. And so if you don't see them as artists, then it's difficult to read their lyrics and hear figurative language."
The one wrinkle complicating that analysis is the burden of authenticity upheld by trap and drill artists. Before delivering Williams' sentence, Judge Paige Whitaker acknowledged as much from the bench: "It may be that a whole lot of rap music and the rap industry is, honestly, it sounds like a modern-day version of WWE wrestling that used to be on television, where people would just get up and posture and pretend like they hated each other. And it may be that that's a lot of what is going on in the music industry with rap. But whether it is fake or not, it has tremendous impact on kids and young people who think this is cool."
Williams' guilty plea came despite several major hiccups in the prosecution's case, including hostile witnesses, procedural errors that threatened a mistrial, even the recusal of the initial presiding judge, Ural Glanville, for holding improper meetings with a witness for the prosecution. The 28 defendants named in the original YSL indictment had been whittled down to three in the days preceding Williams' plea. While some were separated from the case early on, 12 had taken plea deals along the way — including the rapper Gunna, who pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy.
Steel, on the other hand, continually went to the mat for his client. He was held in contempt and arrested during an argument with Judge Glanville over the aforementioned meetings that eventually got the judge recused. Another memorable moment happened during opening arguments when he proclaimed to the jury that the "Thug" in his client's stage name was an acronym that stood for "Truly Humble Under God."
During Thursday's sentencing, Steel gave a less-rehearsed closing that felt like a line-item rebuttal of every allegation in the prosecution's case. In it, he drew a grand comparison first made nearly a decade ago by the unlikely Young Thug fan, Sir Elton John, calling the rapper a modern-day John Lennon. "If you are a modern-day John Lennon," Judge Whitaker said to Williams before sentencing him, "I know you're talented, and even if you choose to continue to rap, you need to try to use your influence to let kids know that that's not the way to go. And there are ways out of poverty besides hooking up with the powerful guy at the end of the street selling drugs."
The prosecution maintained all along that Young Thug was that "powerful guy." It's the reason the court ruled against granting bond for Williams from the trial's outset, after the state argued that he would be more capable of witness intimidation if set free.
For his part, Williams, who took the opportunity to address the judge directly prior to being sentenced, expressed remorse and apologized for taking up the court's time. "Through these last two and a half years of my life, you are really, truly, honestly the best thing that has happened to me because you made everything fair for me and everybody involved," he told Judge Whitaker.
"I know what I bring to the table. I know what I am. I know the heights I've reached. I know the impact I've got on people in the community, all people. I learned that late, these past two or three years. And maybe it was because I was probably on drugs or anything, I don't know. But I have came to my senses."
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