The two remaining defendants in the gang conspiracy and racketeering case against YSL, the Atlanta rap label that prosecutors said doubled as a violent street crew led by Young Thug, were found not guilty on Tuesday of murder and conspiracy to violate the RICO act.
The verdict ended a winding trial that became the longest in Georgia history. It arrived nearly two years after jury selection began and followed a year of testimony from close to 200 witnesses and nearly 16 hours of deliberations spread across four days.
Young Thug, the platinum-selling rapper born Jeffery Williams, accepted a guilty plea on Oct. 31 and was released from jail after being sentenced to time served and 15 years of strict probation. As the case limped toward its conclusion in recent weeks, three other defendants also negotiated plea deals amid chaotic proceedings.
Yet two of the original six men on trial — Deamonte Kendrick, known as the rapper Yak Gotti, and Shannon Stillwell, also known as Shannon Jackson — said they rejected similar deals with prosecutors, opting to leave their fate to jurors in Fulton County, Ga.
On Tuesday, Mr. Kendrick and Mr. Stillwell were acquitted of the 2015 murder of Donovan Thomas Jr., an alleged gang rival, and also found not guilty of participating in criminal street gang activity and conspiracy to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO. Mr. Stillwell was also acquitted of a second murder, but he was found guilty of a single count: possessing a firearm as a felon.
The judge in the case, Paige Reese Whitaker, was required to sentence Mr. Stillwell to the maximum sentence for the gun charge — 10 years in prison — because of recidivism guidelines. But she opted to convert all but two of those years to probation while also crediting Mr. Stillwell with time served.
The not-guilty verdicts on the most serious charges in the drama-filled case represented a high-profile defeat for the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, who had brought the case under the same racketeering law that she used to indict Donald J. Trump and others in what prosecutors said was a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. That case is likely to be delayed substantially, if not dismissed, following Mr. Trump’s election win last month.
Prosecutors from Ms. Willis’s office had argued that YSL, or Young Slime Life, was a subset of the national Bloods gang that participated in murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, witness intimidation and drug dealing, all in an effort to boost the reputation of the group, in part by documenting its crimes in rap music. After a splintering with another local Bloods set, the authorities said, YSL engaged in a back-and-forth gang war that terrorized poor Atlanta neighborhoods with more than 50 violent incidents since 2015.
A May 2022 indictment originally charged 28 men as associates of YSL, although some pleaded guilty ahead of trial and others had their cases severed.
Defense lawyers in the case contended that while some of the accused might have committed isolated crimes, they were not in service of YSL but the result of personal disputes between men from desperate circumstances. The tough talk in YSL’s music, they argued, was merely a gangster pose, often misunderstood and exaggerated for attention in search of success in the theatrical world of hip-hop.
The case was plagued by delays and disruptions from the start. Over the summer, the judge overseeing it was replaced by Judge Whitaker following an extended dispute with the defense over bumpy witness testimony. Last December, Mr. Stillwell was stabbed in jail; while awaiting the verdict this week, Mr. Kendrick was also stabbed by another inmate.
Along the way, witnesses who had previously admitted to authorities that YSL was a gang and detailed their crimes on its behalf proved difficult to pin down on the stand, opting instead to obfuscate and equivocate when pressed on specifics.
Simone Hylton, a deputy district attorney for Fulton County, said during her closing arguments that this could be expected when witnesses were made to “confront the people they snitched on,” adding, “None of these witnesses are going to come in here and say what they told the police.”
Prosecutors instead relied on extensive accounts from investigators, as well as piles of social media evidence and music that they said laid out the gang’s practices, aims and accomplishments in semi-coded language.
Lawyers for the defendants said that their art was being misinterpreted and used against them. Witnesses who claimed to be part of YSL, the defense argued, were liars who simply told law enforcement what they wanted to hear in order to get themselves out of trouble, knowing that the authorities had it out for the rap star in their midst.
“They have to suck him into this vortex caused by their relentless, ridiculous pursuit of Jeffery Williams,” Doug Weinstein, a lawyer for Mr. Kendrick, said in his closing argument to jurors.
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