Pras Michel has been sentenced to 14 years in jail.
Pras Michel has been jailed
The Fugees rapper was convicted of 10 fees – together with performing as an unregistered agent of a international authorities – again in April 2023 in a world fraud case after he accepted $100 million from disgraced Malaysian financier Jho Low to affect the administrations of US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump and his punishment has now been handed down.
He declined to deal with the court docket earlier than US District Choose Colleen Kollar-Kotelly doled out his sentence.
However Pras’ legal professional, Peter Zeidenberg branded the punishment “utterly disproportionate to the offense” and plans to attraction each his conviction and sentence.
Prosecutors had sought a life setence as a result of the 53-year-old rapper had “betrayed his nation for cash” and “lied unapologetically and unrelentingly to hold out his schemes.”
They wrote: “His sentence ought to replicate the breadth and depth of his crimes, his indifference to the dangers to his nation, and the magnitude of his greed.”
The Prepared of Not hitmaker’s workforce had sought a three-year jail time period and felt a life sentence could be an “absurdly excessive” punishment as a result of it’s one sometimes handed right down to terrorists and cartel leaders.
His attorneys wrote in a court docket submitting: “The Authorities’s place is one that will trigger Inspector Javert to recoil and, if something, merely illustrates simply how simply the Pointers may be manipulated to provide absurd outcomes, and the way poorly geared up they’re, a minimum of on this event, to find out a good and simply sentence.”
The costs included claims Pras violating marketing campaign finance legal guidelines throughout Barack Obama’s 2012 election marketing campaign and illegally lobbed the Trump administration in 2017, however the musician argued he merely needed to generate profits and bought dangerous authorized recommendation whereas reinventing himself on the planet of politics.
Pras beforehand insisted he “by no means needed to be a spy” however nonetheless discovered his conduct “a bit thrilling”.
He instructed Selection: “I don’t know if subconsciously it was a bit thrilling for me … I like spy motion pictures, however I by no means needed to be a spy. I don’t suppose that’s attractive. However part of it felt like that …
“Technically, I’m a international agent.”
