Even more legal things, and Beanie Sigel was sent to prison this week - for about an hour. The rapper was sentenced in family court to six months detention unless support payments of $26,000 were made to the two mothers of his children, and he was immediately imprisoned. Sigel paid the money within an hour of being detained, and an additional $2,000 in fines, before being released.
In court Sigel claimed that he has made cash payments to the babymothers involved, but has no record to prove it, whilst his lawyer Walter McHugh also argued that Sigel has not been earning enough money to pay the support because he has been under house arrest, in drug rehab or in prison for much of the past two years. Maria McLaughlin, the DA judging the case, however, noted that Sigel donated $5,000 in August for a reward in a high-profile missing-person case. McHugh claimed the reward money was only donated in Sigel's name, and went on to contend that prosecutors were only now pursuing the child-support case more vigorously because Sigel was acquitted two months ago of a 2003 shooting. McLaughlin said that claim was "insulting."
As previously reported, Sigel, born Dwight Grant, has a long history of staying on the wrong side of the law. He left prison in August after serving just short of a year on a federal weapons charge, and was found not guilty in September this year of the charge that he nearly shot a man to death in Philadelphia back in 2003.