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Rapper Granted $10M After Jury Finds Officers Involved Fabricated Evidence That Lead to Murder Conviction

A San Francisco-area rapper is telling his side of the story of how he was framed for murder over a decade ago.

Jamal Trulove’s wrongful conviction for the killing of his friend Seu Kuka in July 2007 was thrown out Friday, April 6 and the VH1 reality star was awarded $10 million. The damages came after jurors found San Francisco Police Department lead homicide detectives Michael Johnson and Maureen D’Amico violated Trulove’s rights by fabricating evidence against him and withholding evidence that may have helped his case, SF Gate reported.

“I just couldn’t understand or fathom that you could get convicted or sent to prison [for life based on] just what one person said,” the rapper tells Sana G Morning Show of getting 50 years to life.

Acknowledging his popularity from “I Love New York 2,” Trulove said the witness had changed her story about how she couldn’t quite identify him as the shooter at Sunnydale public housing complex. Then, he said someone recognized him at the prison following his conviction. The fellow inmate had been in jail the same day the witness came in for questioning.

“I remember this Samoan girl came in crying and them saying, ‘Are you sure it ain’t blasé, blasé Trulove?'” the star recalls the prisoner telling him. “So the only way I could ever know that guy was there is if he remembered my last name, Trulove.”

The rapper, who said his children’s earliest memory of their father is him as an inmate, said the woman who wrongly accused him of murder should be held accountable. He also noted that she had been placed in the witness protection program to help “hype up [their] case.”

“She got up there and she said I did it and they ran all the way up there with it,” he says before discussing the six years he spent in prison researching the shooting incident. “I’m over there investigating my own case, finding bullet shells that they didn’t even find, looking at the original homicide files and you see the erasing. But all of this is still ‘conspiracy’ to them. It said, ‘Jamal Trulove got away with murder and he found a way to set all this up and sue us and now he got $10 million. That mother f—er.'”

Trulove added that investigators would have turned his discovery into a grand scheme on the rapper’s part.

His conviction was ultimately overturned by a state appeals court in 2014 when it was discovered a prosecutor falsely claimed to jurors that the witness, who was a neighbor, was threatened and risked her life by coming forward.

The following year, another trial ended in a jury acquittal.

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