Corey "C-Murder"
Miller will officially be a free man in the next 24 hours, as the rapper will
be released from prison today (Mar. 16).
Miller has been
incarcerated since 2002. He is currently being held in the Concordia Parish
Jail in Ferriday, Louisiana, where he has been held since Hurricane Katrina
devastated the city of New Orleans.
The rapper will
be home sometime today after going through processing.
"Its been
a long road but the truth finally came out. I can’t wait to go home, see my
people and be up in the studio to finish up my album and focus on my label",
C-Murder said in a statement released to AllHipHop.com through his managers
Barbara Pescosolido and Lupe Ceballos.
Miller was convicted
of second-degree murder in the shooting death of 16-year-old Steven Thomas.
Thomas was shot in the chest after an argument inside of the Platinum Club in
Jefferson Parish, Louisiana in January 2002.
The rapper was
convicted in Sept. of 2003 and sentenced to a mandatory life sentence. He appealed
the case in 2004, after discovering prosecutors had expunged the criminal records
of some of their witnesses and withheld evidence from Miller’s defense team.
In 2004, the original
trial judge, Judge Martha Sassone ordered a new trial for Miller in light of
the new evidence.
Prosecutors appealed
Sassone’s ruling and in March of 2005, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeal struck
down Sassone’s ruling and upheld Miller’s second-degree murder conviction.
Miller appealed
the ruling in Feb. 2006 and on Mar. 10, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned
Miller’s murder conviction and ordered a new trial. It is now up to prosecutors
to decide if they want to take Miller to trial again.
The rapper’s bond
was set at $500,000 yesterday (Mar. 15), despite a prosecutor’s protest that
Miller is a “danger to the community.”
Miller was originally
held on $2 million bond in 2002, but it was revoked, after it was learned that
Miller bribed two Jefferson Parish prison officers to smuggle in a cell phone
into prison, which prosecutors said Miller used to intimidate potential witnesses.
"I still think
Mr. Miller is an imminent danger to the community," prosecutor Roger Jordan
told Judge Sassone during yesterday’s hearing. "Witnesses fear this defendant.
They were afraid to come to court in the last trial."
Once released,
Miller could be held in Baton Rouge, where he faces two counts of attempted
second-degree murder in a separate case, which is slated to go to trial May
30.
The charges stem
from an incident shortly before Miller was charged with killing Thomas, in which
Miller fired a gun at a nightclub owner and security guard, after he was told
he would be searched entering a nightclub in New Orleans.
