Eric Holder, the man who was convicted of shooting and killing Nipsey Hussle on March 31, 2019, has been sentenced to 60 years to life in prison. The Associated Press reports Holder was sentenced today after being convicted of first-degree murder last July. He was also convicted of two counts of attempted voluntary manslaughter and two counts of assault with a firearm for shooting two other men who both survived.
The sentencing was delayed so Holder’s defense attorney, Aaron Jansen, could attempt to get his potential sentence reduced; although Holder was not eligible for the death penalty, the length of his sentence comes as no surprise. Jansen tried to get Holder’s conviction reduced to manslaughter or second-degree murder, but Superior Court Judge H. Clay Jacke rejected those motions in December.
Holder’s defense relied on testimony that he had not planned to shoot and kill Nipsey at the Marathon Clothing store that day; instead, his defense argued that he’d attacked Hussle in a fit of rage at being accused of snitching by Nipsey. However, witness testimony and surveillance footage suggested he’d had more than enough time to cool off, that he’d initially left the scene before returning armed with two handguns, and that he’d fired multiple times, hitting the two bystanders in addition to the rapper, leaving little reasonable doubt he’d intended to kill.
Although Nipsey’s family declined to appear, one of his close friends, Herman “Cowboy” Douglas, did give a statement at the hearing. “Our community right now, we lost everything, everything we worked for,” he said. “One man’s mistake, one man’s action, messed up a whole community. I don’t care what you give this guy. It ain’t about the time. I just want to know why. The world wants to know why. Why someone would do that?”
Nipsey Hussle is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.