OAKLAND — At a Monday morning court hearing, a federal judge sentenced a popular Oakland rapper to five months in federal custody for a supervised release violation involving an arrest in Las Vegas.
Devin Hairston, who raps under the stage name C0ldgame, was arrested last August on the Las Vegas strip, when an officer pulled a car over and found a firearm inside. Hairston’s attorney said in court records that neither the car nor the gun belonged to Hairston, but his presence in Las Vegas alone was against the law; based on the terms of his supervised release on a federal gun case, Hairston wasn’t allowed to travel out of state.
Before U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam handed down the five-month sentence Monday morning, Hairston apologized in court. He said he simply wanted to get out of the Bay Area for a while and didn’t think his probation officer would approve of the trip. He said he was planning to return the day before he was arrested and said in retrospect it was a “dumb decision.”
I know how it may seem on paper, Your Honor, but I have not been involved in any gang activity whatsoever while I was out,” Hairston said. He later added, “I enrolled into college, I was supposed to start Sept. 8. I set goals for myself I was actually trying to accomplish.”
Hairston gets credit for the roughly four months he’s already spent in jail awaiting a resolution on the supervised release violation charge.
Last January, Hairston was sentenced to two years and three months in federal prison in a gun possession case, where prosecutors linked him and several co-defendants to the so-called “F— Everyone” gang, a subset of the Oakland-based ENT/YNIC gang. In that case, Hairston was implicated in part by photos on his Instagram showing him kissing the barrel of an assault weapon.
Two weeks before his arrest in Las Vegas, Hairston was arrested for hanging out with other suspected FE gang members, according to his arrest report.
Hairston is a popular Oakland rapper whose videos have garnered millions of views online. He said in court that rapping was his career and he had shot part of a music videos in Las Vegas. The person who owned the car where the gun was found was a cameraman whom he met 15 minutes prior, he said.
“If I knew it was a gun in the car, I wouldn’t have got in,” Hairston said.
Gilliam said he was concerned by Hairston’s proffer that he went on the trip because he believed he could get away with it, but added that he appreciated Hairston’s apology. Gilliam said he agreed that Hairston would probably be better off if he left the Bay Area, but added that — ironically — he must comply with his supervised release conditions to stay there until he’s off federal probation.
“I listened really closely to what you said and I found it encouraging,” Gilliam said. “If you follow through, that’s all this is about. It’s about doing the …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Latest News
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