On November 6, rapper Meek Mill was sentenced to two to four years in prison for violating probation after he got into a fight at St. Louis Lambert International Airport in March 2017. Mill has been on probation since he was 21 years old after convictions on gun and drug charges, and Judge Genece E. Brinkley has been overseeing his case. She doesn’t like Meek Mill, and Mill’s legal team says she has made inappropriate comments about him in and out of court. They claim she has been acting more like a prosecutor than an impartial jurist. His lawyers have been trying unsuccessfully to remove her from his case.
A request to have her removed filed with Common Pleas Court Judge Leon Tucker last week was denied. Tucker said he didn’t have jurisdiction to hear the request and that the rapper’s legal team would need to go to the state Supreme Court.
Meek says the judge tried to extort him for personal favors— she reportedly wanted him to write a song in honor of her. When he refused, he says he was punished by the judge with a harsher sentence.
Mill’s mother made a tearful public plea to Brinkley last April, saying, “I don’t even understand how he’s been on probation for that many years. It’s like he murdered somebody… He has to beg to see his son. What kind of woman does that?”
