Suge Knight’s guilty plea may spell end of icon’s era
Suge Knight was almost always cheery in court.
Whenever the judge overseeing his murder case cracked a sarcastic aside, the former rap impresario belly laughed so hard his broad shoulders bounced for several seconds. Where he could, he slipped compliments to Judge Ronald S. Coen.
“I trust you,” Knight told him during a pretrial hearing. “You’ve been my judge and my advisor… You’re my only friend now.”
Coen smiled.
As the kowtowing played out in court hearings over the past three years, it became hard to reconcile the man with a graying beard seated at the defense table with his longtime image as one of the most powerful and intimidating men in music.
In the burgeoning West Coast rap scene he helped popularize, chronicling gang life, drugs and police brutality, Knight was an imposing figure — a swaggering record producer with a cigar in his mouth and a diamond-studded “MOB” ring on his pinky finger.
The Death Row Records co-founder long swore he’d acted in self-defense on the murder rap and deserved to be set free. But on Thursday, four days before his trial was scheduled to start, he struck a deal with prosecutors, capping his cinematic legal saga with an anti-climactic coda.
Knight pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter for ramming his truck into two men in the driveway of a Compton burger restaurant on Jan. 29, 2015, after an argument on the set of a commercial for the N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton.” One of the men — Terry Carter, a 55-year-old businessman known for his boundless generosity — was fatally injured.
The deal, under which Knight, 53, could serve up to 28 years in prison, perplexed some onlookers, but defense experts said eleventh-hour moves aren’t uncommon and often pay off. In the weeks leading up to a trial, prosecutors must give the defense a list of people they plan to call as witnesses, said criminal defense attorney Peter Johnson, who lectures at UCLA Law School.
“You can pretty much predict the testimony and how damaging that will be and you weigh the risks of conviction,” Johnson said.
If convicted at trial, Knight faced life in prison.
Knight, who turned himself into authorities a day after the hit-andrun, has said there were people with guns at the scene and that he hit the men while fleeing for his life. In court papers filed last year, Knight claimed that former business partner Dr. Dre paid $20,000 to have him murdered, adding that a hit man was at the burger stand that day. An attorney for Dr. Dre dismissed the accusations as “absurd.”
Los Angeles criminal defense attorney R.J. Manuelian said he’s confident that Knight’s lawyer didn’t have a solid witness to corroborate the gun theory — “a real big weakness in the case,” he said.
“The only way they’d win is if the jury believed Suge Knight, which is a tall order,” said Manuelian, who followed the case since the 2015 arrest and planned to offer television commentary throughout the trial.
Born Marion Hugh Knight Jr., the Compton native was a standout athlete. He played football in college and, for a split second in 1987, joined the Los Angeles Rams as a replacement player during the strike. Standing 6-foot-4, Knight’s size led to his next gig as a bodyguard for celebrities, including R&B singer Bobby Brown.
In the early 1990s, Knight and Dr. Dre formed Death Row Records and as the seminal label exploded into a $100-million-a-year enterprise, Knight built an infamous reputation.
But the courtroom conclusion this week could well mean the last public chapter in the life of a one-time icon who authorities say had a habit of threatening anyone who crossed him.