Incarcerated rapper Ja Rule was sentenced yesterday on tax evasion charges...
Ja Rule, who pleaded guilty in March to misdemeanor failure to file charges, received 28 months in prison for failing to file taxes on the $4 million he earned between 2004 and 2008. Ja Rule was also ordered to pay $1.1 million to the IRS.
From nj
“I want to say I'm sorry," Ja Rule told Judge Shwartz, as a Newark courtroom packed with summer legal interns and others watched in silence. "I in no way attempted to deceive the government.”Ja Rule's sentence will be served concurrently with the two year sentence he's currently serving on gun charges, adding about 4 months on his sentence.
He added, “I was a young man who made a lot of money." And, he said, “I didn't actually know how to deal with these finances ... [and] I didn't have the best people guide me.”
Both Ja Rule and his lawyer, Stacey Richman, also told Judge Shwartz that Atkins' business had been experiencing financial problems. Richman argued Atkins "does not have the financial savvy to have maintained a set aside so that his taxes would be paid.”
Atkins said: “I didn’t have the actual finances to pay off [the taxes], otherwise I would have." Still, he added, "I made mistakes," and he also said, "Things kind of spun out of control."
Atkins was subdued and often looked down at the defense table. Richman said that for the last two weeks, as he awaited today’s sentencing hearing, Atkins was held in a solitary-confinement situation for 23 hours a day at the Essex County jail. Jail officials, she said, believed such confinement was needed to protect the rapper. She repeatedly called the conditions “draconian” in court.
