The 33-year-old Atlanta artist, born Jeffery Lamar Williams, was one of 28 alleged street gang members indicted in May 2022 on racketeering and other charges.
Prosecutors accused Young Thug of being the leader of YSL, or Young Slime Life, an affiliate of the Bloods gang, and accused him of violating state racketeering laws.
The underlying crimes in the racketeering indictment include murder, assault, carjacking, drug trafficking and theft.
The Grammy-winning rapper pleaded no contest to racketeering charges and no contest to being the leader of a criminal street gang, but pleaded guilty to six other charges, including gun and drug charges.
The New York Times reported that he was sentenced to prison and 15 years’ probation by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, who replaced a previous judge who presided over the lengthy trial.
Online Fulton County jail records showed Young Thug was released Thursday into a docket under his birth name. The disposition of the charge was listed in the database listing as “time served” or “probation.”
Jury selection in the case began in January 2023, but opening arguments did not take place until November 27 of that year.
During opening arguments, prosecutors said Young Thug’s record label, YSL, was a front for a crime ring and that he was its leader.
“The evidence will show that YSL meets all the requirements because it is a criminal street gang,” said Fulton County Prosecutor Adriane Love.
Reading verses from Young Thug’s song “Take It To Trial,” Love said the lyrics the accuser identified “bear an uncanny resemblance to very true, very real and quite specific events.”
“We didn’t follow the texts to solve the murder, we chased the murder and found the texts,” she said.
The defense maintained that YSL stands for Young Stoner Life Records, a hip-hop label Young Thug founded in 2016 that, he said, amounts to a vague association of artists, not a gang.
Defense attorneys had sought to exclude song lyrics from evidence, saying that “rap is the only fictional art form treated in this way.”
A rap vanguard essential to the Atlanta scene, Young Thug is one of the most famous and idiosyncratic figures in contemporary hip-hop.
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