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rot a, a ‘old had re~ hat 9 for TWO COUNTS OF SEXUAL AS. parent compromise verdict, convicted of two counts of sexual abuse—specifically, forcibly touching Ayanna Jackson's but- tocks. Bail was set at three million dol- lars, and Tupac turned himself in and was incarcerated. On February 7, 1995, he was sentenced to a term of not less than one and a half to not more than four and a half years in prison. A few months after Tupac was sen- tenced, Jacques Agnant's indictment was dismissed, and he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. When I asked Melissa Mourges, the assistant district attorney who had tried the case against Tupac, why Agnant had been dealt with in such a favorable way, she said that Ayanna Jackson was “reluctant to go through the case again,” Jackson had, however, brought a civil suit against Tupac following the trial. (The suit was subsequently settled.) Agnant’s lawyer, Paul Brenner, be- hieves that Tupac should never have been convicted. “Ie was a very weak case,” he says. “A lot went on” at Nell’s. Brenner suspects that the police planted the gun they found in the hotel room. “I worked for the P.B.A. for ten years, I Anow the police. . . . The police are friends of mine,” he savs. “But Tupac had no friends in the police. I couldn’t find a policeman who had a good word to say about Tupac.” Tupac's conviction that Agnant had set him up seemed only to deepen with time. He went public with it on his last album, “The Don Kuluminati”: I hope my true mutha-fuckas know This be the realest shit I ever wrote. ... Listea while I take you back and lay this cap A real live tale About a snitch named Haitian Jack Knew he was working for the feds. . . . Set me up Wer me up Nigga stuck me up. Agnant has filed a suit for libel against Tupac’s estate, Death Row, Interscope, the producer and the engineer of the song, and the publishing company. Ayanna Jackson has always maintained that she was not involved in any setup. What role Agnant, the police, or any other governmental entity may have played in the sexual-assault case against Tupac is conjectural. But this much is plain: once the gears of the criminal-justice sys- tem were set in motion, Tupac was penal- ized more for who he was—a charismatic gangsta rapper with a political back- ground—than for what he had done. ‘T imagine serenity’s pretty much the same, one season to the next?” Melissa Mourges seemed to share the animus many police officers felt for Tu- pac; Charles Ogletree argued in his ap- peal that her conduct was so prejudicial (she railed against Tupac as a “thug,” among other things) that a new trial was warranted on that ground alone. The setting of bail at three million dollars, Ogletree commented, was “inhumane,” and the sentence was “out of line with the conviction.” Tupac was sent to the Clinton Correctional Facility in Danne- mora, New York, a maximum-security prison. “The entire case,” Ogletree said, “reeked of impropriety.” N the very beginning, prison granted Tupac a sort of grace, extricating him from the manic, overcharged existence he had created for himself. Outside, he drank heavily and smoked marijuana constantly. Now his mind was clear. And in Danne~ mora he was liberated from the demands of his music. His gangsta-rapping had been a pose, he said, He had been re- quired to maintain the pose and he did not regret doing so, but it was a pose nonetheless, and one he was abdicating. He had laid down the tracks of a new al- bum, “Me Against the World,” before he was incarcerated and, having finished that, he told Vise magazine, “I can be free. When you do rap albums, you got to train yourself. You got to constantly be in character. You used to see rappers talk- ing all that hard shit, and then you see them in suits and shit at the American Music Awards. I didn’t want to be that type of nigga. I wanted to keep it real, and that's what I thought I was doing. Burt . . . let somebody else represent it..I represented it too much. I was thug life:” With the opportunity to reflect, 3O= ber, on the events that led to his incat- ceration, he said he realized that, “even though I’m innocent of the charge they. .