SPECIAL DELIVERY: MURDER
(CBS/AP) NEW YORK - Rapper G. Dep was sentenced on Tuesday to
15-years-to-life in prison for a 1993 murder to which he suddenly
confessed in 2010, stunning police.
The sentence was the
minimum for his murder conviction. A judge, prosecutors and even the
jury foreman said G. Dep, born Trevell Coleman, deserved credit for
coming forward when he'd never been suspected in the long-cold case.
"It
may not be the best legal strategy, but, certainly, it was the right
thing to do," Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus said,
"even though it landed you in the situation you're in now."
With
that, the 37-year-old rapper - who had a brush with fame in the late
1990s and early 2000s - walked slowly out of the courtroom, looking back
at his wife, mother and a couple of longtime family friends in the
audience. He didn't speak at his sentencing, but his lawyer, Anthony L.
Ricco, said G. Dep was at peace with his decision to speak up.
"He was in search of his redemption and his honor and some might say that he achieved that," Ricco said after court.
The rapper told police in 2010 that he'd shot someone while trying to rob him on a street corner years earlier.
During
the trial, he acknowledged confessing but argued that police might have
mismatched his account to the October 1993 fatal shooting of John
Henkel, 32.
G. Dep was convicted last month - a decision jurors
made "with a heavy heart," foreman Jim Nelson said in a letter to
Justice Obus asking for leniency for the rapper.
"I, and I
believe many others, have been moved by Mr. Coleman's story and by what
he did in listening to his conscience and coming forward after all these
years," wrote Nelson, the editor-in-chief of GQ magazine. His name was
redacted in court records but appeared in an editor's letter he wrote
about the case in the magazine's June issue. Source: http://www.cbsnews.com
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