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Judge says Suge Knight should stand trial for murder

By | Published on Wednesday 8 July 2015

Suge Knight

A judge has ruled that Suge Knight should stand trial for murder, despite lawyers for the one time hip hop mogul arguing that a key witness’s testimony lacked credibility and the case should be dismissed.

As previously reported, Knight killed a man and injured another after he drove his pick-up truck into them outside a burger bar in LA back in January. He is accused of deliberately driving his vehicle into the two men, though he claims he struck Terry Carter and Cle ‘Bone’ Sloane by accident as he was fleeing from a violent altercation.

As also previously reported, Sloane, who survived the hit and run, initially described the incident, including the punch up that preceded it, in quite some detail when interviewed by police. But in court he said the specifics were now not so clear to him, adding “I will not be used to send Suge Knight to prison” and “I just know I screwed up and Terry’s dead”.

Knight’s lawyer – now Thomas Mesereau, best known for successfully defending Michael Jackson in his 2005 child molestation trial – hoped to use the inconsistencies in Sloane’s testimonies to discredit him as a witness, with a view to having the murder case thrown out.

But the judge hearing the arguments said that it was clear Sloane and Knight had a long and turbulent history akin to a “soap opera”, and that it would be impossible to assess the former’s credibility as a witness in a preliminary hearing. Judge Stephen A Marcus also noted that Sloane hadn’t specifically said Knight wasn’t the man who fatally hit Carter in his truck.

Mesereau declined to comment on the latest development, except to say the case was still in its early stages, and that he would be seeking to have his client’s $10 million bail reduced.



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