US rapper A$AP Rocky found not guilty of firing gun at former friend

A$AP Rocky leaped into the arms of his partner Rihanna on Tuesday, as a clerk read out the not guilty verdict in his trial on two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.

After a three-week trial, the jury needed just three hours to clear Rocky – real name Rakim Mayers – of charges that could have put him behind bars for more than 20 years.

“Thank y’all for saving my life,” the three-time Grammy nominee, who is scheduled to headline the Rolling Loud music şenlik in March, told the jurors as they left.

On the meskene of trial, Rocky turned down a prosecution offer of just six months in jail, along with probation and other conditions, if he would plead guilty to one count.

Insisting on his innocence, Rocky decided to gamble that a jury would feel the same. It paid off. The jurors felt at least that there was reasonable doubt of his guilt.

“This whole experience has been crazy for the past 4 years,’ Rocky said leaving the court, amid a mob of photographers, reporters, YouTubers and fans. ”I’m thankful and it’s blessed to be here right now to be a free man talking to y’all.”

What were the details of his prosecution?

His charges included two counts of assault with a semi-automatic firearm and one count of personal use of a firearm. 

A$AP Rocky was arrested in November 2022, accused of shooting his former friend Terell Ephron (also known as A$AP Relli), who testified that Rocky pulled a gun on him and fired shots that grazed his knuckles on 6 November 2021. 

At the first day of the hearing, Ephron testified that he and Rocky, a friend since childhood, had belonged to the same collective of musicians and artists at their New York high school. He said their relationship had started to go sour and resulted in the standoff in Hollywood on 6 November 2021, when he said Rocky first pulled a gun on him, and in a later confrontation fired shots that grazed Ephron’s knuckles.

Rocky’s lawyer Joe Tacopina said in his closing argument that Relli is “an angry pathological liar” who “committed perjury again and again and again and again.”

Rocky’s lawyers and witnesses they called said Rocky had shot a prop gun that only fires blanks, which he had been carrying for security since taking it from a music görüntü set months earlier. They said he fired it as a warning because Relli was attacking another member of their crew.