Judge Gives DMX a Year in Prison and a Chance to Be Heard, Musically

Photo

The music filled the courtroom Wednesday, introduced by insistent beats and the wail of a siren. Sitting at the defense table, wearing baggy blue jail garb, the rapper Earl Simmons, known as DMX, nodded as a recording of his voice spit out lyrics he had written about his life.

I split

And said that I’ma be that seed

That doesn’t need much to succeed

Strapped with mad greed

And a heart that doesn’t bleed

The recording of “Slippin’,” was played by his defense team as Mr. Simmons’ faced sentencing for tax evasion in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The aim of the unusual audio presentation, according to a letter by Mr. Simmons’s lawyer, Murray Richman, was to give the court a sense of “raw Earl.”

In court, Mr. Richman compared his client to the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron and Keats.

“It’s spectacular and it’s meaningful,” he said of Mr. Simmons’s rapping. “It’s so catchy, it talks to you.”

Judge Jed S. Rakoff listened to the music with a neutral expression. Later he sentenced Mr. Simmons to a year in prison, saying that it was important he be punished for a “particularly brazen and blatant” crime but adding that he also had some sympathy for the defendant.

“In the court’s view Mr. Simmons is a good man, a very far from perfect man,” Judge Rakoff said. “In many ways he is, to give the cliché, his own worst enemy.”

Prosecutors had recommended a five-year prison term for Mr. Simmons, who has sold millions of hip-hop records, performed around the world and starred in movies. But last year he was charged with evading income taxes and trying to obstruct the Internal Revenue Service. Federal prosecutors said that Mr. Simmons owed $1.7 million in unpaid taxes and penalties derived from income be brought in between 2002 and 2005. He also failed to file taxes from 2010 to 2015, prosecutors said, while earning at least $2.3 million during that time.

Mr. Simmons schemed to evade the taxes by maintaining a “cash lifestyle,” prosecutors added, using bank accounts belonging to others and demanding that a $125,000 fee from the television show “Celebrity Couples Therapy” be issued to him without taxes being withheld. He also listed his gross income incorrectly during bankruptcy proceedings, prosecutors said.

In November Mr. Simmons pleaded guilty to one count of tax fraud. He told Judge Rakoff on Wednesday that he had not plotted to steal “like a criminal in a comic book,” but also acknowledged his misdeeds.

“I take responsibility,” he said in court. “I know the taxes needed to be paid.”

In addition to the year in prison, Judge Rakoff ordered that Mr. Simmons make $2.29 million in restitution to the government and be subject to three years of supervised release.

His lawyer, Mr. Richman, had asked for leniency, calling Mr. Simmons “a modern gospel” and “a child of chaos” and saying that he had been abused by his mother who once knocked out some of his teeth with a broom handle.

In his heyday Mr. Simmons was a hip-hop powerhouse, rapping about violence and redemption in what Rolling Stone termed “the roughest and grimiest voice in hip-hop, the sound of gravel hitting the grave.”

He became the only artist in the history of the Billboard 200 to reach No. 1 with his first five albums, the company said in 2003. And he acted in television shows like “Third Watch” and movies including “Never Die Alone,” in which he portrayed a drug dealer named King David.

But Mr. Simmons also became known for getting into trouble with the law. In 2004 he pleaded guilty in Queens to reckless endangerment and driving under the influence of drugs. In 2008 in Arizona he pleaded guilty to charges of theft, drug possession and animal cruelty.