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Artist News Legal
Gunna declined bail again
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 14 October 2022
A US judge has again declined to grant the rapper Gunna bail as he awaits a trial next January on gang-related charges.
Gunna and fellow rapper Young Thug were both charged, along with 26 others, in the US state of Georgia back in May. They are all accused of involvement in a gang called Young Slime Life which, it’s alleged, committed murders, shootings and carjackings.
Both Gunna and Young Thug – who deny the charges against them – have been working hard to get bail while they await trial, but so far without success. Prosecutors claim that allowing the rappers to leave jail could result in witness intimidation. And seeking to back up that concern in relation to Gunna they claimed that one of the other defendants in the case had said he would be willing to “whack” someone on the rapper’s behalf.
According to Billboard, Gunna’s legal rep, Steven Sadow, argued in court this week that such unverified “proffers” from the prosecution have repeatedly been disproven and that the judge therefore should be very “skeptical” of such claims.
However, judge Ural Glanville said he shared the concerns regarding possible witness intimidation and that those concerns had not yet been alleviated by the defence.
The ongoing criminal case against Gunna and Young Thug has proven controversial, of course, because the prosecution is using the two rappers’ creative output as evidence against them.
The use of lyrics and music videos as evidence in criminal cases has become increasingly controversial in recent years, because of concerns around bias, whereby jurors are more likely to assume rap lyrics are rooted in reality while lyrics from other genres are seen as fictional.
