After Fani Willis Drops YSL Murder Charge, Defendant Is Sentenced to 5 Years
One of three remaining YSL trial defendants was sentenced to five years in prison by a Fulton County Superior Court judge Wednesday afternoon.
Damekion Garlington was originally facing life in prison if convicted on all charges — including murder and attempted murder — but he entered into an Alford plea with the district attorney's office earlier this week. An Alford plea allows a defendant to maintain their innocence while admitting the prosecution likely has enough evidence to secure a conviction.
In exchange for prosecutors agreeing to downgrade the murder charge to aggravated assault and drop the attempted murder charge, the 29-year-old pleaded guilty.
Garlington had been Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis' last hope to hold one of the four people charged with the 2022 murder of Shymel Drinks accountable. Drinks was central to the prosecution's argument that Atlanta rapper Young Thug and 27 others were members of a criminal street gang called YSL. Last year, Willis' team dropped murder charges against Miles Farley and Quamarvious Nichols, two of the three other defendants charged with Drinks' murder, in exchange for guilty pleas on lesser charges. The third, Shannon Stillwell, was found not guilty in early December.
The district attorney's office did not respond to Capital B Atlanta's request for comment.
Judge Paige Reese Whitaker sentenced Garlington to 20 years in jail — five years to serve incarcerated, and 15 years on probation. She suspended a five-year sentence for possession of a firearm during a felony that will be voided as long as he successfully completes probation. Garlington will also receive credit for the nearly three years he's spent in jail since his arrest in September 2022.
'I hope that … this has been an opportunity for you to realize that the direction that your life was going is not a good direction, and that you are determined at this point to turn your life around and make good decisions from here on out,' Whitaker said after the sentencing hearing.
She reminded Garlington that he must stay out of Fulton County throughout his probation and will be required to serve the five-year suspended firearms sentence if he violates the terms, which include: no contact with the victims, their relatives, or any gang members; no drugs; no gang paraphernalia; and no guns or replicas of guns.
Other conditions stipulate that he must also complete a GED program within the first year of probation, which the judge noted he had already begun working on, and secure full-time employment within the first six months of his release.
Garlington will also have to sign a Fourth Amendment waiver as a condition of his release, which means that for the entirety of his probation he, his car, his home, and his social media accounts will be subject to search by law enforcement at any time with or without probable cause.
Garlington was one of the 28 people indicted on racketeering charges in May 2022 by the Fulton County DAs office for their alleged involvement in YSL — what prosecutor's classified as a criminal street gang that operated in the Cleveland Avenue neighborhood. Like many of Young Thug's co-defendants, Garlington wasn't able to find a defense attorney by the time the main trial began so his case was severed and scheduled to be tried separately.
Jury selection in the trial for the two remaining YSL racketeering defendants, Christian Eppinger and Demise McMullen, is scheduled to begin June 9.
The post After Fani Willis Drops YSL Murder Charge, Defendant Is Sentenced to 5 Years appeared first on Capital B News - Atlanta.
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