Jury to begin deliberations Friday in A$AP Rocky's gun assault trial after closings
Rocky's lawyer will finish arguing Friday morning, then prosecutors will give rebuttal. You can watch live on my YouTube channel.
Rapper Rakim “A$AP Rocky” Mayers’s lawyer Joe Tacopina will finish his closing argument on Friday in Rocky’s gun assault trial in Los Angeles.
Tacopina argued for about two hours on Thursday and is scheduled to resume at 9 a.m. Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Lewin will give the rebuttal. Judge Mark S. Arnold will read final instructions to the jurors, then they’ll begin deliberating. This means we could have a Valentine’s Day verdict.
Deputy District Attorney Paul Przelomiec began his two-hour closing argument on Thursday by reminding jurors that he called the case “very simple” in his opening statement.
“I want to reiterate: This is not a difficult case,” Przelomiec said. He said Rocky’s defense witnesses Lou Levin and Jamel “Twelvvy” Phillips repeatedly lied under oath, including that Rocky fired a fake gun during his Nov. 6, 2021, confrontation with Terell “Relli” Ephron in Hollywood.
“They repeatedly lied when asked about a whole variety of topics we’ll get into. But there was one thing that not even they could lie or deny,” Przelomiec said. “The defendant and certainly his significant other are powerful individuals within the entertainment industry. And they certainly have enough power to cancel small players like Mr. Ephron or Twelvvy or Lou if that’s what they want to do.”
“And that right there, in that millisecond the gun is pulled out, that’s what Mr. Ephron is faced with,” Przelomiec said.
Przelomiec played several portions of the recorded calls between Relli and Wally Sajimi that Rocky’s lawyers gave prosecutors. Relli told Tacopina the recordings were fake in his cross-exam, so Tacopina wanted to authenticate the recordings for jurors to discredit Relli.
However, prosecutors have emphasized that Relli didn’t know he was being recorded and had never heard the calls before Tacopina played them in court. And they’ve worked to show jurors that the full recordings incriminate Rocky.
“These are his unfiltered, unprepared thoughts, He’s not talking to the police,” Przelomiec said. “What he says to Wally in those recordings is exactly what he told you here in court.”
Tacopina told jurors on Friday that prosecutors “embraced perjury” from alleged shooting victim Terell “Relli” Ephron, and Lewin complained to Judge Arnold that the comment alone was “severe misconduct.”
“Either he doesn’t know California law, or he doesn’t care,” Lewin said.
Rihanna walked into the courtroom about 9:49 a.m. as Przelomiec argued. She was holding one of her and Rocky’s toddler sons, and a caretaker was carrying the other boy. The children sat with Rihanna and the caretaker in the front row of the courtroom behind the defense table.
The caretaker left the courtroom with the older boy, RZA, after about 20 minutes, and the younger boy, Riot Rose, sat in Rihanna’s lap with a children’s book. People watching my YouTube trial stream said they could hear the boys cooing.
The children were not in the courtroom in the afternoon, but Rihanna was. She and Rocky left the courthouse arm and arm about 4:19 p.m. with bodyguards holding umbrellas under the pouring rain.
I asked Rocky what he did with the shell casings from his fake gun after he fired it, but he didn’t answer.
Przelomiec told jurors the fact that the prop gun Levin said Rocky fired also discharges shell casings, which he said makes it “painfully obvious” that Levin didn’t think through his perjurious lies. Tacopina has repeatedly emphasized that seven police officers searched the shooting scene and didn’t find shell casings, which he’s said shows Relli is lying when he said he recovered two shell casings from the scene.
“If you accept that the defendant had a fake gun that Lou just described, you’d also have to explain why there are no fired fake prop cartridges at the crime scene,” Przelomiec said. He said the gun “would operate just like a real semiautomatic pistol, and it would shoot those fired cartridge casings out the side just like a real gun would.”
“So why are there no prop cartridge cases found at the scene?” Przelomiec asked.
You can read my article about the prop gun cartridges here.
I’m posting videos of closings on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram and will have a full article after the verdict, which could be on Friday. I’ll also stream the rest of Tacopina’s closing argument and Lewin’s rebuttal beginning at 9 a.m., followed by verdict watch.
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