In a court hearing on Tuesday, YNW Melly and one of his attorneys were accused of plotting a daring prison escape.
According to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, YNW Melly, who has been in jail for the last four years, planned, along with his cellmate, to sneak out of jail with the lawyer’s help.
YNW Melly is on trial for the murder of two of his friends, Christopher “YNW Juvy” Thomas, Jr. and Anthony “YNW Sakchaser” Williams, and his case is getting closer to the trial with the court earlier this year signaling that jury selection was the next step.
At the hearing on Tuesday, the Broward County Sheriff’s General Counsel’s Office outlined details of the alleged plot.
“On April 11, 2022, Broward Sheriff’s Office received a confidential tip regarding inmates Nicholas Lewis and Jamell Demons, both housed in the same unit at the Main Jail, planning an escape from jail by having Demons’ attorney bring in two handcuff keys to aid in the escape,” part of the statement said.
According to the statement, the tip came from another inmate. Authorities searched Lewis’ cell and found several contrabands, including a six-inch shank, two razor blades, two lighters, and rolling papers.
Drugs said to be Seroquel and Klonopin pills which require a prescription that Lewis does not, was also found. As for Melly, nothing was found in his cell except snacks and “excessive jail-issued clothing.”
In Court on Tuesday, Christian Tsoubanos, Assistant General Counsel for the Broward Sheriff’s Office, claimed that although nothing was found in Melly’s cell, it doesn’t mean that he is innocent. He noted that the department received two key pieces of information, one of which turned out to be factual about the “shank and drugs.”
Melly’s time in jail has not been without incident. The rapper lost his phone privileges after making the majority of about 3000 calls to his girlfriend Erran Barnett without his jail id number. One of his lawyers has also been accused of professional misconduct and possibly illegal acts.
The lawyer, Raven Liberty, reported sharing her phone login credentials to make “non-recorded video visitation” calls with Melly. In law, calls by the lawyers are privileged and wouldn’t be recorded, which if true, means that Liberty might have committed an offense.
The Sheriff’s office intercepted a call on September 16, 2022, where Melly is having a conversation and says to Barnett, “Hey, I’m supposed to be talking to my lawyer. Whenever they call you, be like, ‘Is this Ms Liberty? Is this this person? Just be like yup, yup, yup’.”
In the meantime, YNW Melly’s mother, Jamie King, lashed out at prosecutors after the reports of an alleged jailbreak were shared.
“This is just another tactic for them to literally tarnish my son’s character in everything. They do not want him having attorney visits in person which will cause for ineffective counsel so we went to court for that and they took his phone calls, and they had him on lockdown, they have no evidence whatsoever that his attorneys did anything wrong to prove these accusations,” she said in a video shared on Instagram.
She continued, “They knew it would get picked up by the media so when we get ready to pick a jury, hopefully in the next two weeks, it’s gonna be ‘oh this kid tried to escape, oh this kid tried to do all these things’. This is all fake because they do not have a case.”
