This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Legal
Judge refuses to cut Suge Knight bail
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 20 July 2015
The judge overseeing the Suge Knight murder case has refused to lower the one time hip hop mogul’s $10 million bail, rejecting various arguments put forward by his lawyer.
As previously reported, Knight is accused of running over two men after a dispute outside a burger bar in LA back in January, killing one of his victims. The former Death Row Records chief went through a number of lawyers early on in this case, before appointing Thomas Mesereau, perhaps best known for successfully representing Michael Jackson in his child molestation trial.
The new legal man initially tried to have the murder case thrown out because of inconsistencies in the testimonies of a key witness, the other man run over by Knight. But the judge ruled that the trial should continue.
Mesereau then sought to have his client’s bail reduced, partly by showing a longer version of CCTV footage of the hit and run incident, and then arguing that Knight’s criminal history had been exaggerated by prosecutors, adding that the former hip hop man was not a gang member and not a flight risk.
But the judge countered that the longer version of the CCTV footage didn’t show anything of substance not already seen in the shorter edit already shown in court, before saying he’d heard “nothing to convince me” that the current level of bail wasn’t still appropriate.
Knight is now due back in court on 17 Sep.