Former Bad Boy Records recording artist G. Dep was sentenced to a 15-year prison sentence on Tuesday morning (May 8) for a murder he committed two decades ago.
According to the NY Post, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus gave the rapper (real name: Trevell Coleman) the lowest possible sentence because of his honesty in the cold murder case.
“The circumstance of your being before the court now suggests to me a maturity and decency that wouldn’t have been evident at the time,” Obus said. “It was the right thing to do, even though it landed you in the position you find yourself in now.”
G. Dep was convicted on the murder charges in April, two years after he walked into a Harlem precinct and confessed to the fatal shooting of a local man in 1993 during a robbery.
At the time, the rapper was unaware that the man he robbed may have died. He was in treatment for PCP addiction, and was determined to right the wrongs in his life and take responsibility for a crime that was eating at him for years.
In the wake of the sentencing, Dep’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, says he wanted to clear his conscience and hopes he never regrets his actions.
“My hope is that Trevell never wavers from his decision,” Ricco said. “Fifteen years is a long time. Fifteen years in the penitentiary for putting yourself there is an even longer time.”
His lawyer also told the Times that the 37-year-old has suffered mockery and insults from fellow prisoners and in the press for confessing to a shooting that he had essentially gotten away with, only to find out that his victim had died and that he had turned himself in for murder.
In confessing, Dep told cops that when he was 17, or 18, or maybe 19, he had shot a man three times during a botched mugging at Park Avenue and 114th Street. He didn’t know if the man lived or died. Authorities matched his confession to a the cold-case fatal shooting of John Henkel, gunned down on Oct. 19, 1993 at the same address.
G. Dep broke into the mainstream hip-hop scene back in 1998, when he made a guest appearance on “The Mall,” from Gangstarr’s Moment of Truth album. Later that year, he inked a deal with Diddy’s Bad Boy Records, and then released his debut LP, Child of the Ghetto, in 2001. Despite two well-recieved singles, “Let’s Get It” and “Special Delivery,” the album was heavily bootlegged and failed to move many units.
He would later split with Bad Boy Records, and in 2004 dropped a mixtape, The Deputy: The Sheriff Is Back in Town Volume 1. But since 2003, Dep had reverted back to the street life, raking up more than 30 arrests — including drug-related charges to burglary to grand larceny. He’s also had a long-history of drug addiction .. up until his 2012 confession.
G. Dep and his wife were raising twin sons of kindergarten age when he decided to confess, against her wishes.
