Infamous Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight has sensationally agreed to a 28-year prison sentence after previously pleading no contest to vehicular manslaughter over a 2015 hit-and-run incident.
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Knight entered the plea early Thursday (US time) after originally being charged with murder, attempted murder, hit-and-run, and fleeing the scene after the incident in January 2015 in which Knight became involved with an altercation with Cle “Bone” Sloan, a consulting producer on the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton, which escalated into a fistfight. In the resulting fallout, Knight got into his car and clipped Sloan, before running over Compton businessman Terry Carter. Carter subsequently died as a result of his injuries.
Knight’s court proceedings on the matter have been something of a circus, involving long delays and confusion. The trial was speculated to begin on October 1st and would have involved unusually tight security, including the non-publication of a witness list before proceedings began, and identity suppression of some of the witnesses called.
Throughout the course of the farcical proceedings, Knight was accused of threatening Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gary, two of his former attorneys were pinched on charges of witness tampering, his fiancee entered a plea of no contest on charges she sold video of the incident, and he tried to have his court-appointed attorney (unbelievably, Knight’s 16th) fired mere days ago.
However today, mere before jury selection was set to begin, Knight agreed to a custodial sentence totalling 28 years in prison. 22 years will be served for the charge of vehicular manslaughter, while an additional 6 years was added due to a third strike violation.
Previously, Knight had been sentenced to five years’ probation after pleading no contest to assaulting two rappers in 1995. In 1997, he was sentenced to jail for violating that probation after participating in an altercation in Las Vegas that culminated hours later in the fatal shooting of Tupac Shakur while he rode in Knight’s car.
These current charges carried had Knight staring down the barrel of a life sentence without the possibility of parole. With this plea, Knight will not be eligible for release until he is 81 years old.
He will be formally sentenced on October 4th.
