Rapper Young Thug was released from jail on Thursday after pleading guilty to involvement in a criminal gang, as well as drug and guns charges, in an unexpected turn of events in Georgia’s longest trial in history.
The 33-year-old Atlanta musician, born Jeffery Lamar Williams, was one of 28 suspected street gang members indicted in May 2022 for racketeering and other offenses.
Prosecutors accused Young Thug of leading YSL, or Young Slime Life, a Bloods group, and charged him with breaking state racketeering laws.
The racketeering indictment alleged murder, assault, carjacking, drug dealing, and theft.
The Grammy-winning rapper pleaded no contest to racketeering and being the leader of a violent street gang, but he was found guilty on six additional counts, including guns and narcotics offenses.
According to the New York Times, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, who took over the protracted trial, sentenced him to time served and 15 years probation.
According to online Fulton County jail records, Young Thug was freed on Thursday using his birth name. The charges were classified as “time served” or “probation” on the database listing.
Jury selection in the case began in January 2023 but opening arguments were not held until November 27 of that year.
During opening arguments, prosecutors said Young Thug’s record label, YSL, was a front for a crime ring and he was the leader.
“The evidence will show that YSL checks all of the boxes for being a criminal street gang,” Fulton County prosecutor Adriane Love said.
Love read verses from Young Thug’s track “Take It To Trial,” saying the lyrics the prosecution had identified had “an uncanny similarity to very true, and very real, and quite specific events.”
“We didn’t chase the lyrics to solve the murder, we chased the murder and found the lyrics,” she said.
The defense insisted that YSL stands for Young Stoner Life Records, a hip-hop label that Young Thug founded in 2016 and which, they say, amounts to a vague association of artists, not a gang.
Defense attorneys had sought to exclude lyrics from evidence, saying that “rap is the only fictional art form treated this way.”
A rap vanguard essential to the Atlanta scene, Young Thug is one of contemporary hip-hop’s most famous and most idiosyncratic figures.