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A federal jury in Brooklyn on Tuesday (Feb. 27) found two New York City men guilty in the 2002 murder of Run-DMC‘s Jam Master Jay, setting the stage for potential decades-long prison sentences.

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Following a three-week trial, the jury returned guilty verdicts against both Karl Jordan, Jr., 40, and Ronald Washington, 59, who were charged in 2020 with the rap pioneer’s long-unsolved killing in Queens.

The convictions came after prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses to the stand to prove their case, in which they accused Jordan and Washington of killing the rapper as payback after he cut them out of a cocaine deal. The defense called just one witness of their own: an expert on memory.

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“This case is not complicated,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Artie McConnell said during his closing arguments last week. “It’s about greed, it’s about money, it’s about jealousy.”

Following Tuesday’s conviction, Jordan and Washington each face a minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. They will be able to challenge the verdict, first to the judge and then to a federal appeals court, but such appeals face long odds.

Attorneys for both defendants and the prosecution did not immediately return requests for comment on the verdict.

Run-DMC, a trio consisting of Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, Joseph “Rev. Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, is widely credited as one of the most influential early acts in hip-hop history. The trio’s 1985 release, King of Rock, was hip-hop’s first platinum album, and the group’s 1986 cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Jay’s shocking killing, on Oct. 30, 2002, had long been one of hip-hop’s famous cold cases, joining the unsolved murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. Though witnesses were in the room when the murder happened and police generated a number of leads, no charges were filed until August 2020, when prosecutors finally unveiled the case against Washington and Jordan.

Over the three-week trial, prosecutors told jurors that Jay had turned to the drug trade as Run-DMC’s popularity had waned. They argued that Washington, a childhood friend, and Jordan, Jay’s godson and neighbor, had helped Jay sell the drugs, but eventually plotted his murder after he allegedly cut them out of a deal.

Jurors heard testimony from two alleged eyewitnesses, Uriel “Tony” Rincon and Lydia High, who say they were in the studio on the night of the shooting. Rincon identified both men and named Jordan as the shooter; High identified Washington and said he had been joined by an unknown shooter. Both said they had withheld such information from investigators for years for fear of retaliation.

As is common in criminal cases, neither Washington nor Jordan testified in their own defense. Their attorneys called only an expert witness to testify on human memory, who told the jury that memories can fade and change over time and can be affected by stress.

The jury began deliberating on Thursday (Feb. 22) before being dismissed for a three-day weekend. They initially resumed deliberations on Monday (Feb. 26), but then were ordered to restart from scratch after a juror was excused because they claimed they could not be impartial.

Sentencing and post-trial motions will take place in future proceedings. Jay Bryant, a third man allegedly involved in the killing who prosecutors charged with murder last May, will have a separate trial later this year.

Beyond Tuesday’s guilty verdict, the case over Jay’s killing could have a lasting effect on the law.

In a ruling near the beginning of the trial, the federal judge overseeing the case ruled that prosecutors could not cite violent rap lyrics written by Jordan as evidence against him. Warning that “music artists should be free to create without fear that their lyrics could be unfairly used against them,” the judge said such materials should only be used as evidence if they have a clear and direct connection to the crime at issue in the case.

The ruling came amid a broader debate over the use of rap lyrics in criminal trials, a controversial practice that has drawn backlash from the music industry and efforts by lawmakers to stop it. A high-profile gang trial in Atlanta, in which prosecutors are using Young Thug’s lyrics against him, has drawn particular scrutiny to the issue.

Don Henley said Monday that he never gave away handwritten pages of draft lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits, calling them “very personal” in testimony that also delved into an ugly but unrelated episode: his 1980 arrest.
Henley, the Grammy-winning co-founder of one of the most successful bands in rock history, is prosecutors’ star witness in an unusual criminal trial surrounding the lyrics sheets.

Henley says they were stolen decades ago from his barn in Malibu, California. He testified Monday that he was appalled when the material began turning up at auctions in 2012.

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“It just wasn’t something that was for public viewing. It was our process. It was something very personal, very private,” he said in a raspy drawl. “I still wouldn’t show that to anybody.”

The defendants are three collectibles experts who bought the pages years later through a writer who had worked with the Eagles on a never-published band biography. The defense maintains that Henley willingly gave them to the scribe.

Under cross-examination, Henley acknowledged that he didn’t remember “the entirety” of his conversations with the writer, Ed Sanders, who isn’t charged in the case. Nor, Henley said, could he recall whether he gave Sanders permission to take the documents off the property.

But Henley insisted he gave Sanders only access to the documents, not permanent possession of them, in the hopes that a firsthand view of “the time and effort that went into” the lyrics would improve the book.

He said he told Sanders he could look at the pages, ideally at a breakfast table in an apartment upstairs from the barn.

“I never gave him permission to keep those items,” Henley said.

At issue are about 100 sheets of legal-pad paper inscribed with lyrics-in-the-making for multiple songs on the “Hotel California” album, including “Life in the Fast Lane,” “New Kid in Town” and the title track that turned into one of the most durable hits in rock. Famed for its lengthy guitar solo and puzzlingly poetic lyrics, the song still gets streamed hundreds of millions of times a year.

The defendants — rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz and rock memorabilia specialists Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski — have pleaded not guilty to charges including criminally possessing stolen property. Their lawyers say there was nothing illegal in what happened to the lyrics sheets.

The defense has signaled that it plans to question Henley, 76, about how clearly he remembers his conversations with Sanders during an era in which the rocker was living in his own fast lane. In an apparent attempt to defuse some of those questions, a prosecutor brought up Henley’s 1980 arrest.

Henley pleaded no contest in 1981 to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, after authorities found cocaine, quaaludes, marijuana and a 16-year-old sex worker naked and suffering from an overdose at his Los Angeles home the prior November. He was sentenced to probation and a $2,500 fine, and he requested a drug education program to get some possession charges dismissed.

Henley testified Monday that he’d been depressed about the Eagles 1980 breakup and had sought “an escape” by calling a sex worker.

“I made a poor decision which I regret to this day,” he said.

As for his memory, he said, “I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast last Friday morning, but I can tell you where we stayed when we played Wembley in 1975 and we opened for Elton John and the Beach Boys,” referring to London’s Wembley Stadium.

Sanders began working with the Eagles in 1979 on a band biography that never made it into print. He sold the documents to Horowitz, who sold them to Kosinski and Inciardi. Kosinski has a rock ‘n’ roll collectibles auction site; Inciardi was then a curator at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

In a 2005 email to Horowitz, Sanders said Henley’s assistant had sent him the documents for the biography project, according to the indictment.

Henley reported them stolen after Inciardi and Kosinski began in 2012 to offer them at various auctions.

Henley also bought four pages back for $8,500 in 2012. He testified that he resented having to buy back what he contends was his own property. But he said he saw it as “the most practical and expedient” way to get the auction listing, which contained photos of the lyrics sheets, off the internet.

Kosinski’s lawyers, however, have argued that the transaction implicitly recognized his ownership.

Meanwhile, Horowitz and Inciardi started ginning up alternate stories of how Sanders got hold of the manuscripts, Manhattan prosecutors say.

Among the alternate stories were that they were left behind backstage at an Eagles concert, that Sanders received them from someone he couldn’t recall, and that he got them from Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, according to emails recounted in the indictment. Frey had died by the time Horowitz broached that last option in 2017.

Sanders contributed to or signed onto some explanations, according to the emails. He hasn’t responded to messages seeking comment about the case.

Kosinski forwarded one of the various explanations to Henley’s lawyer, then told an auction house that the rocker had “no claim” to the documents, the indictment says.

Henley has been a fierce advocate for artists’ rights to their work. Since the late 1990s, he and a musician’ rights group that he co-founded have spoken out in venues from the Supreme Court to Congress about copyright law, online file-sharing and more. As recently as 2002, Henley testified to Congress to urge copyright law updates to fight online piracy.

Henley also sued a Senate candidate over unauthorized use of some of the musician’s solo songs in a campaign spot. Another Henley suit hit a clothing company that made t-shirts emblazoned with a pun on his name. Both cases ended in settlements and apologies from the defendants.

Henley also testified to Congress in 2020, urging copyright law updates to fight online piracy.

Two men accused of murdering Run-DMC‘s Jam Master Jay will finally head to trial Monday (Jan. 29), more than 21 years after the rap icon’s killing.
Karl Jordan, Jr. and Ronald Washington, who were charged with Jay’s long-unsolved 2002 murder in 2020, will stand trial at a Brooklyn federal courthouse. Prosecutors say the two men killed Jay as payback after a failed cocaine deal; if convicted, they each face the possibility of life in prison.

Following the selection of a jury last week, opening statements are slated to begin at 9:30 a.m. Monday. The trial, before U.S. District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall, is expected to run for a month.

Run-DMC, a trio consisting of Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, Joseph “Rev. Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, is widely credited as one of the most influential early acts in hip-hop history. The trio’s 1985 release, King of Rock, was hip-hop’s first platinum album, and the group’s 1986 cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Jay’s shocking 2002 killing had long been one of hip hop’s famous cold cases, joining the unsolved murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. Though witnesses were in the room when the murder happened, and police generated a number of leads, no charges were filed until August 2020, when prosecutors finally unveiled the case against Washington and Jordan.

According to charging documents and statements by prosecutors, Washington and Jordan broke into Jay’s studio on the night of Oct. 30, 2002. Washington allegedly initially pointed a gun at another individual in the studio; as he was doing so, Jordan allegedly fired two shots, one of which struck Jay in the head at close range, killing him almost instantly.

The motive for the killing was allegedly a drug deal gone bad. Prosecutors say Jay had arranged to purchase 10 kilograms of cocaine that would be distributed in Maryland by Washington, Jordan and others. When Jay backed out of the deal, prosecutors say, the two decided to kill him.

“The defendants allegedly carried out the cold-blooded murder of Jason Mizell, a brazen act that has finally caught up with them thanks to the dedicated detectives, agents and prosecutors who never gave up on this case,” prosecutors said at the time. “The charges announced today begin to provide a measure of justice to the family and friends of the victim, and make clear that the rule of law will be upheld, whether that takes days, months, or decades.”

Jay Bryant, a third man allegedly involved in the killing who prosecutors charged with murder last May, will have a separate trial later this year.

Ahead of the trial, Jordan and Washington argued that prosecutors waited too long to charge them, meaning they wouldn’t be able to properly defend themselves. For instance, Jordan said cell phone records that would support his alibi were no longer available, and that key witnesses would have trouble remembering information.

But in September 2022, the federal judge overseeing the case rejected those arguments, calling them “speculative” and unsupported by evidence: “The court has no idea what Jordan believes the phone records contain, how they could conceivably contradict the Government’s evidence, and how those contradictions could conceivably demonstrate that Jordan did not commit the crime.”

A Los Angeles judge ruled Monday that there is enough evidence for A$AP Rocky to stand trial on charges that he fired a gun at a former friend and collaborator outside a Hollywood hotel in 2021.
Superior Court Judge M.L. Villar made the ruling at a preliminary hearing, after hearing roughly a day and a half of testimony. Rocky has pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.

The 35-year-old hip-hop star, fashion mogul and two-time Grammy nominee is in a relationship with Rihanna, with whom he has two young sons.

Villar said “the totality of the video and testimony” shows there is sufficient evidence for the defendant to go to trial. She emphasized that preliminary hearings have a much lower evidence standard than a trial.

Rocky, sitting in the courtroom, showed no visible reaction.

“We’re not disappointed, not surprised, we expected to go to trial, we’ve been planning for trial all along,” Rocky’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, said outside court. “Rocky is going to be vindicated when all this is said and done, without question.”

At the first day of the hearing, which resumed Monday after a long delay, Terell Ephron testified that he and Rocky, a friend since childhood, had belonged to the same collective of musicians and artists at their New York high school.

He said their relationship had started to go sour and resulted in the standoff in Hollywood on Nov. 6, 2021, when he said Rocky first pulled a gun on him, and in a later confrontation fired shots that grazed Ephron’s knuckles.

Tacopina established while questioning a police detective that seven officers who searched a sidewalk and street about 20 minutes after the shots were allegedly fired found no evidence of the shooting, and that a pair of 9 mm shell casings in police possession were recovered by Ephron, who returned to the scene about an hour after the standoff.

Tacopina played body camera video of the officers, who searched the ground for about 10 minutes. Ephron, who first went to police to report the incident two days later, turned over the shell casings, which the detective said had no recoverable fingerprints on them.

Prosecutors showed a separate video from near the scene where no people are initially visible, but what sounds like two gunshots can be heard. Then a man comes running around a corner, then slows to a walk. The man’s identity is not clear in the video, but LAPD Detective Frank Flores testified they have established it is Rocky.

Flores testified under Tacopina’s questioning that no 9 mm pistol was recovered when a search warrant was served on Rocky.

Prosecutors showed a still from surveillance video showing a man in a hooded sweatshirt whose face is not visible holding what appears to be a gun, along with another image from the same video showing the face of the man in the sweatshirt, with no gun visible. Flores testified that the combined images led them to establish it was Rocky.

Tacopina, who is also representing Donald Trump in his New York criminal case and others, pressed the detective on the weapon, suggesting police had no way of knowing whether it was a loaded or even real gun.

“That gun or whatever it was was not tested, right?” Tacopina asked. “No, it was never recovered,” Flores said.

Tacopina asked, “You’re not sure if it’s an operable gun or a non-operable gun or whatever?”

“Without having it, I can’t tell you whether it’s operable,” the detective replied.

Tacopina also tried to cast doubt on the minor injury to Ephron’s hand, questioning why he waited until he returned to New York to seek medical treatment.

He showed the detective a photo of the scraped fingers and said, sarcastically, “It’s a miracle he survived that shooting.”

The judge admonished him, one of several times she told Tacopina to change his tone.

Rocky was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in the case in April, and charged in August. He arrived in the courtroom Monday morning wearing a dark suit, sunglasses and a face mask, after spending the weekend at the Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix auto race, where he had a prominent role as Puma’s creative director in the clothing brand’s partnership with F1.

He has released little music in recent years, and has become better known as the romantic partner, fellow fashion influencer and co-parent of Rihanna, with whom he had a second son in May. His first two studio albums in 2013 and 2015 both went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Rocky also became an unlikely cause for then-President Donald Trump, who said he was trying to get the rapper freed and returned to the U.S. when he was jailed after a brawl in Sweden in 2019. He was found guilty of assault at trial but was given a “conditional sentence” that meant no additional jail time.

In California courts, preliminary hearings like these are a sort of miniature version of a trial, with only a judge deciding whether sufficient evidence exists to move forward. The standard of proof for doing so is far lower than what’s required for criminal guilt.

A Michigan judge narrowed the issues Monday in a dispute over Aretha Franklin’s estate, saying the only task for jurors is to decide whether a 2014 document handwritten by the Queen of Soul and found in couch cushions can be accepted as a valid will.
The stipulation was made by attorneys for Franklin’s sons before a jury was seated in Oakland County Probate Court.

Franklin died in 2018 at age 76. But five years later, the music superstar’s estate remains unsettled. A son, Ted White II, believes a 2010 handwritten will should mainly control the estate, but two other sons, Kecalf Franklin and Edward Franklin, are in favor of a 2014 document.

Both were found in 2019, months after Franklin died. The 2014 document was under cushions at Franklin’s home in suburban Detroit.

The brothers sat shoulder to shoulder behind their lawyers in Judge Jennifer Callaghan’s courtroom. Another brother, Clarence Franklin, is under a guardianship and apparently is not participating in the trial.

There are differences between the documents, though they both appear to indicate the sons would share income from music and copyrights, which seems to make that issue less contentious than a few others.

The 2014 version crossed out White’s name as executor and has Kecalf Franklin in his place. Kecalf Franklin and grandchildren would get his mother’s main home in Bloomfield Hills, which was valued at $1.1 million when she died but is worth much more today.

For five years, Aretha Franklin’s estate has been handled at different times by three executors, known under Michigan estate law as a personal representative. A niece, Sabrina Owens, quit in 2020, citing a “rift” among the sons.

The last public accounting filed in March showed the estate had income of $3.9 million during the previous 12-month period and a similar amount of spending, including more than $900,000 in legal fees to various firms.

Overall assets were pegged at $4.1 million, mostly cash and real estate, though Franklin’s creative works and intellectual property were undervalued with just a nominal $1 figure.