Rapper G. Dep, a former P. Diddy protégé who turned himself over to police for a cold-case murder he wasn't suspected of committing, was sentenced to 15 years in prison today. You'll recall that in 2010, G. Dep (born Trevell Coleman) came forward to confess to a murder he committed in 1993, because his conscience was bothering him. At the time, his brother told the Post he thought G. Dep was an "idiot" to confess: "He has three kids and a wife. It was years and years and years ago. Finally, we're not always thinking about it...and now it has to be dug up all again."
G. Dep had, according to the AP, "a brush with fame in the late 1990s and early 2000," but at his sentencing today his lawyer said, "That success was not able to overcome that sense of remorse and guilt that he had about what he had done one night in his teenage years." After falling into drug and alcohol abuse, and minor busts for trespassing and other offenses, the rapper went to rehab and came out with a desire for a clean slate. So he told police he'd "fired at someone during an attempted holdup on a Harlem corner" when he was a teenager. He escaped on a bicycle, and was unsure whether the man had been hit.
During the trial, G. Dep acknowledged confessing, but his lawyer argued that "police might have mismatched his account to the October 1993 shooting of John Henkel, 32." He now plans to appeal, but the jury in this trial had no doubt. The foreman, it turns out, was GQ's Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson, who wrote about the case for the magazine's forthcoming issue. "I, and I believe many others, have been moved by Mr. Coleman's story and by what he did in listening to his conscience and coming forward after all these years," Nelson writes. "We found him guilty, because he was, and no one's excusing anything."
Before sentencing G. Dep to the minimum sentence, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus told the rapper, "I'm sure there are people that are second-guessing your decision [to confess to the crime], and there will be people that will second-guess it. Perhaps it wasn't the best legal strategy, but certainly it was the right thing to do, even though it landed you in the position that you are in now."
