Tekashi 6ix9ine, real name Daniel Hernandez, has only a few months left to serve after snitching on the Nine Trey Gangster Bloods, but he and his lawyer are concerned he won’t make it that far. Citing a confirmed case of the coronavirus at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, 6ix9ine’s lawyer, Lance Lazzaro, wrote a letter to a judge obtained by Inner City Press, asking for him to be let out of Queens Detention Center early due to the rapidly spreading outbreak. The letter comes just one day after news that Harvey Weinstein tested positive in his upstate prison. Lazzaro wrote that the rapper’s asthma, which has hospitalized him several times in the past, could put him at high risk if he contracts the disease. Lazzaro also notes that 6ix9ine had bronchitis and sinusitis last October. “Mr. Hernandez has been complaining to prison officials this week about shortness of breath, but apparently the warden of his facility will not allow Mr. Hernandez to go to the hospital despite the recommendation of the facility’s medial doctor that Mr. Hernandez be treated by a doctor at a hospital,” he wrote.
The rapper has previously made several bids for a “get out of jail free card,” including cooperating with the FBI, asking to serve time at home, and just this month, his release was moved up to August. Now that fall is the new summer, Tekashi 6ix9ine will actually be out right on time.
Update, March 25: The judge overseeing Tekashi 6ix9ine’s case denied the rapper’s coronavirus-spurred request for home confinement, writing that he “lacks the legal authority” to grant early release. Manhattan Federal Court Judge Paul Engelmayer said in a three-page order that he was “constrained” and couldn’t act on the rapper’s petition, explaining that early release would be up to the federal Bureau of Prisons. Engelmayer did express concern for Tekashi, real name Daniel Hernandez, saying that he “did not know and could not have known that the final four months of Mr. Hernandez’s sentence would be served at a time of a worldwide pandemic to which persons with asthma, like Mr. Hernandez, have heightened vulnerability … Had the Court known that sentencing Mr. Hernandez to serve the final four months of his term in a federal prison would have exposed him to a heightened health risk, the Court would have directed that these four months be served instead in home confinement,” Engelmayer wrote.
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