T.I. Sentenced To One Year and a Day In Prison, Could Serve Less

As expected, rapper T.I. was sentenced to serve one year and one day in jail after pleading guilty to weapons charges, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. While federal sentencing guidelines mandated that Tip serve at least four years and nine months for his crime, the rapper's legal team worked out an experimental plea bargain that allowed T.I. to stay under house arrest, pay a $100,000 fine and serve 1,000 hours of community service, with another 500 hours due after release. Having complied with the requirements of the plea bargain, T.I. was handed the one year and a day sentence today in an Atlanta courtroom. He was arrested in October 2007 for attempting to add guns to an already large illegal arsenal.

T.I isn't expected to report to prison for another six to eight weeks, as commitments prevent the rapper from going to jail any earlier than May 19th. Despite the 366-day sentence, T.I. is only expected to spend 298 days behind bars. According to AJC, the plea agreement allows for the rapper to eliminate 15 percent of his sentence based on good behavior. The two weeks that T.I. spent in prison after his initial arrest will also count toward his prison term, reducing the length of the sentence even further.

"I expect the court will adopt and accept the plea agreement. I expect the court to acknowledge Mr. [Clifford] Harris has lived up to what was expected of him," T.I.'s lawyer Dwight Thomas said. Since the plea bargain, T.I. has visited 25 states and staged 260 events to speak with thousands of teens and adults to encourage them to respect the law and avoid violence and drugs, logging over 1,006 hours in the process, court papers revealed. Rolling Stone followed a day in the life of T.I. as he hit the studio, schools and a basketball court last year.

Related Stories:

• T.I. Preps For Life Behind Bars With "Dead And Gone" Video
• T.I. Counts Down Days Until Jail on MTV's "Road to Redemption"
• Guns, Feds and Kids: T.I. Returns

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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