Former President Donald Trump’s clemency does not protect the rap star from a pending sexual assault case in Florence County.
(CN) – Prosecutors in South Carolina want rap star Kodak Black to be taken into state custody to face a long-standing sexual assault charge after his federal sentence for gun law violations was commuted by outgoing President Donald Trump .
The rapper, who changed his name from Dieuson Octave to Bill Kapri in 2018, was among those who received clemency on Tuesday night by Trump in one of his final acts as president.
Kapri was serving a 46-month sentence in federal prison for making false statements about the paperwork related to the purchase of a gun. According to prosecutors, he falsely stated in the paperwork that he did not have any criminal cases pending against him. He also reportedly wrote a scrambled version of his Social Security number to avoid detection.
His lawyer, Bradford Cohen, suggested that his sentence was too harsh for a nonviolent offense.
“[Kodak Black] is sentenced to 46 months for lying on a government form. Big difference if you are someone in the power of a young African American ”, Cohen tweeted Domigo.
Another Kapri lawyer, Jonathan Schwartz, said in a statement to Courthouse News that the clemency was “exemplary of President Trump’s commitment to criminal justice reform.”
But whether Kapri will be released remains unclear.
Florence County Attorney Ed Clements told the Courthouse News that he has a file holder against Kapri and plans to bring him to South Carolina to face the sexual assault charge. Kapri is not exempt from the South Carolina case in part because presidential clemency applies to federal, not state, charges. In granting Kapri clemency, Trump did not mention or take a position on allegations of sexual assault.
South Carolina prosecutors allege that Kapri forced a woman into a hotel room in February 2016, at one point biting her neck and breast. The woman “said repeatedly [him] stop ”during the sexual encounter, according to a police statement.
“His injuries were documented in a sexual assault kit that was filled out by the medical team,” says the statement.
Clements said the Covid-19 outbreak slowed the process.
“We are going to move forward as fast as we can. The pandemic base court has been stopped, ”he said.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on the detainee.
On Wednesday, shortly after his sentence was commuted, the rapper withdrew his lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons for alleged abuse he suffered while serving time at the Big Sandy high-security prison in Kentucky. The lawsuit alleged that guards beat him, tortured him and placed him in four-point custody for hours on end, without access to a bathroom.
The BOP contested the accounts, pointing to an instance in which it claims that Kapri was restrained for being violent and spitting on a prison guard.
Kapri achieved fame as a teenager around 2014 with his song “No Flockin”. He gained a large following with his subsequent albums, including “Dying to Live”, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The Pompano Beach, Florida native has accumulated hundreds of millions of views of his video clips on YouTube.
According to the BOP, he was housed in the United States’ Thomson Penitentiary, a high-security prison in Illinois, before granting clemency.
The White House press secretary said in a statement that Trump’s decision to commute Kapri’s federal sentence was “supported by several religious leaders, including Pastor Darrell Scott and Rabbi Schneur Kaplan.”
The statement cited Kapri’s “numerous philanthropic efforts” and charitable donations. Kapri’s reported philanthropy includes financing school supplies for families in financial difficulty, a $ 1,000 donation to Rabbi Kaplan’s synagogue and a $ 50,000 donation to Barstool Fund, which provides relief for companies struggling during the new coronavirus outbreak.
Kapri was among several key figures who received Trump’s clemency on Tuesday.
Trump used his forgiving power to dismiss pending charges of fraud against his former campaign advisor Steve Bannon in connection with Bannon’s border financing campaign. The campaign raised more than $ 25 million through the GoFundMe online site.
Rapper Dwayne Michael Carter, also known as Lil Wayne, however, was pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty last month for possession of a firearm as a criminal.
Trump also granted clemency on Tuesday night to South Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen, who served three years of his 17-year sentence for what prosecutors described as one of the biggest Medicare scams ever recorded. In addition to the criminal charges, Melgen had been accused in at least nine lawsuits of injecting eye medicine into patients who had been contaminated during a “multi-dose” process, by which the doctor saved money by removing several doses of drug vials single use.