IT’S BUM RAP
HE VISITS WITH MEEK MILL IN SLAMMER IN FLAP WITH JUDGE OVER PROBATION VIOLATION
CHESTER » The Rev. Al Sharpton arrived in Chester Monday to visit rapper Meek Mill at the State Correctional Institution.
For two-and-a-half hours Sharpton, joined by Mill’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, spoke with the rapper about how his time behind bars represents a greater cultural issue that Sharpton said plagues the criminal justice system in the United States.
“I feel like Meek represents thousands of people in Pennsylvania and even tens of thousands around the country that have been victimized by abusive probation and parole systems,” Sharpton said to a throng of reporters across Route 291 Monday evening, with SCI Chester serving as a backdrop.
Sharpton said the “abusive systems” allows “room for judges to act way beyond what is necessary, what is palpable” and “what is ethical.”
The judge, whom neither Sharpton nor Tacopina called by name, is Judge Genece Brinkley. She sentenced Mill to two-four years in a state correctional facility for probation violations following a pair of arrests.
Mill, who was born Robert Rihmeek Williams, was charged in March after a confrontation with two St. Louis airport employees seeking a photo. Mill refused the request, which triggered a fight. The two employees along with Mill were charged with misdemeanor assault. Mill’s charges were dropped after he agreed to perform community service.
In August, Mill was arrested in New York for reckless endangerment after popping wheelies on a dirt bike without a helmet.
This came following a weapons and drug crime he committed when he was 18 years old and was sentenced to prison in 2008. After spending more than eight months in jail he began serving five years probation, which he violated in 2014 when he performed outside Philadelphia, sending him back to jail for five months.
Mill violated parole again in 2016 while dating performing artist Nicki Minaj, which saw Brinkley tack on another six years of probation.
After two more arrests this year, Brinkley sentenced Mill to the jail term.
Sharpton said Monday the jail sentence doesn’t fit the crimes committed. He said that despite the violations, the probation system itself enables individuals to be “violated at whim.”
“He is representative of something far more than his stardom, he’s a symbol of the abuse of the system that will violate you over nothing and end up ruining the potential and the ability to move forward in life,” Sharpton said.
Defense attorney Tacopina claimed Mill has “not committed violations of the law,” but rather “he’s committed technical violations of probation.”
“If these were serious enough for him to require him to be a guest of the Department of Corrections, the probation office and the district attorney would have requested it, and that’s what’s important,” Tacopina said.
Of the judge, Tacopina has claimed “non-judicial behavior” of Brinkley, who in sentencing disregarded the recommendations of the Philadelphia assistant district attorney and Mill’s probation officer, who both recommended nonjail sentences.
“I stood in a courtroom where the judge took the recommendations of a probation officer and the district attorney and disregarded them completely, and then excoriated the probation officer claiming he didn’t know enough about the case,” Tacopina said.
He called the sentence a “travesty of justice.”
Tacopina has filed two motions for the judge to reconsider her sentence, and also to recuse herself from the case. He said the next step, which will trigger if Brinkley does not respond within the 30day window that closes on Dec. 5, will be to take the case to a higher court.
“If there’s no response from the judge, we can go elsewhere, and we will go elsewhere at that point,” he said.
Tacopina served on the legal team for Mill’s case with Brian McMonagle, who earlier this year served as defense attorney for Bill Cosby.
Sharpton drew comparisons from a visit with rapper Tupac Shakur, whom he said he visited in the 1990s and helped release the rapper from solitary confinement.
“I went to see Tupac, who was brilliant, and I told him, ‘You’re nothing like your image,’ and he said, ‘Neither are you, reverend’ ... So, it was a Tupac moment for me with Meek,” Sharpton said.
He said Mill was in good spirits and mostly concerned with the well-being of his son and mother.
Sharpton added he hopes Mill’s sentence will serve to raise awareness of a systemic problem within the prison system, whom Mill is “representative of too many,” and will help expose a “ruthlessness in the system that should be changed.”
“We had a very blunt talk,” Sharpton said. “He’s a bright young man, he’s committed, and he really said, ‘Reverend, if nothing else, let people understand what this system does.’”