Meek Mill Loses Case

Mill, trying to catch a flight to Atlanta to launch his debut album, was instead handcuffed and detained on Halloween night 2012 with his entourage: an Atlantic Records executive, an off-duty police officer and his cousin.

“They ain’t from where I’m from,” Mill said softly of the jury after they reached their decision. “I (don’t) really expect them to understand what I go through.”

Mill, whose real name is Robert Williams, grew up in North Philadelphia, where the stop occurred.

“I respect their decision, though,” he said. A lead officer on the stop, Andre Boyer, was under investigation and would be fired the next year for lying to Internal Affairs about another traffic stop.

Boyer had racked up more civilian complaints than any other city officer, Mill’s lawsuit said.

Police said they stopped the vehicle over its darkly tinted windows and smelled marijuana, but no drugs were found and no charges filed.

“I just feel like he did me wrong,” Mill said of Boyer.

Defense lawyer Dennis Cogan called the claimed smell “a pretext” frequently used by rogue police to search a vehicle. The mostly-white jury, in an unusual note read aloud after the verdict, said both sides share blame over the encounter.

“Although we voted unanimously that Mr. Williams’ Fourth Amendment rights were not violated, we feel strongly both the plaintiff and defendant were in the wrong and made mistakes,” jurors wrote in a note read aloud after the verdict.

Lawyers for the city said Boyer was not the only officer involved in the stop.

“Any reasonable officer faced with those circumstances would have conducted an investigation,” Amanda Shoffel, a deputy city solicitor, said in closing arguments earlier in the afternoon.

The 26-year-old Mill was on probation at the time from a 2008 drug and gun case. His debut album, Dreams & Nightmares, rose to No. 2 on the charts, according to trial memos. Mill was seeking about $400,000 in lost income, along with money for emotional distress.