ASAP Rocky has been convicted of assault for a street fight in Sweden. The sentence is two months in jail, but the US rapper stays a free man anyway. A Swedish judge has spoken. How and why this is possible I talked about on Belgian Radio 1, in the equivalent of The World Today.
Click to listen to my radio talk (in Dutch)
Scroll to 00:10:33 into the broadcast
VRT Radio 1, De Wereld Vandaag, 14 August 2019, presenter Gert Geens
The Swedish public prosecutor demanded ASAP Rocky to spend six months in jail for the attack on a 19 year old on the streets of Stockholm on 30 June 2019. The artist stated it was self-defence. The Swedish judge ruled on 14 August that self-defence is nonsense, since there was no criminal provocation from the plaintiff, but gave a relatively mild punishment of two months conditional imprisonment plus SEK 12,500 (about EUR 130) in damages, to be equally shared by ASAP Rocky and his two friends which were similarly convicted for their involvement.
Having a conditional sentence means that ASAP Rocky stays a free man, after the month he spent in a Swedish cell awaiting his trail. It also means he does have a criminal record now. But the Swedish judge thinks it is unlikely that the artist will commit a similar offence again, and that ASAP Rocky has not been convicted before, resulted in a lower sentence. |