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ASAP Rocky found not guilty of firing a handgun and avoids decades in prison

He risked a sentence of 24 years in prison if he had been convicted.

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Rapper ASAP Rocky was found not guilty on Tuesday of firing a handgun at a former friend on a Hollywood street in 2021.

“Thank y’all for saving my life,” he told jurors as they left the Los Angeles courtroom. They cleared him of two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.

He risked a sentence of 24 years in prison if he had been convicted.

On the eve of trial, he 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.

A$AP Rocky Shooting Trial
ASAP Rocky, centre, hugs attorney Joe Tacopina after he was found not guilty (Daniel Cole/Pool Photo via AP)

When the verdict was read, Rihanna cried and hugged the defence lawyers. She attended the trial sporadically and brought the couple’s two sons — two-year-old RZA Athelston Mayers and one-year-old Riot Rose Mayers — for some of the closing arguments.

The verdict came at the height of Rocky’s fame, if not the pinnacle of his music career. The three-time Grammy nominee has a banner year in the works, and can now look to it without the threat of prison hanging over him.

He is scheduled to headline the Rolling Loud music festival in March; he is one of the celebrity co-chairs of fashion’s biggest night, the Met Gala, in May; and he stars with Denzel Washington in director Spike Lee’s film Highest 2 Lowest, set for release in early summer.

Prosecutors and their witnesses said that he was beefing with a former friend, ASAP Relli, with whom he had been in a crew who called themselves the ASAP Mob since high school.

They said the two men met up in Hollywood on November 6, 2021, and after a scuffle Rocky pulled the gun and fired twice at Relli, who said one of the shots grazed his knuckle but was not seriously hurt.

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 video set months earlier. They said he fired it as a warning because Relli was attacking another member of their crew.

The jurors were told that despite three years passing since the incident, no one mentioned the phony gun to authorities until the day jury selection began at the trial.

A$AP Rocky Shooting Trial
ASAP Relli testifies during the trial (Frazer Harrison/Pool via AP)

It was not immediately clear whether they reached the verdict because they believed he was in fact carrying a prop gun or that he acted in self-defence.

They did not have to agree on their reasoning, or explain it outside of the jury room. They just had to reach the same conclusion.

Rocky opted not to testify in his own defence.

In his closing argument, deputy district attorney John Lewin urged the jurors not to be influenced by the celebrity or family aspects of the case, and suggested Rihanna bringing the kids to closing arguments was an attempt to manipulate the jury.

“You are not allowed to consider how this might affect Rihanna and his kids,” the prosecutor said. “We are all responsible for our own actions in the world.”

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