Nigerian rapper jailed in US for his lyrics

 An aspiring rapper was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison over a 2007 money-demanding note that threatened a Virginia Tech-like killing spree, failing to convince a judge the writing was innocent lyrics and other musings.
A barely audible Olutosin Oduwole insisted in court that he “did not mean to incite fear.”
“That was never my intention. That is not my character,” said the 26-year-old rapper and former Southern Illinois University student. The note was found in his car on the college’s campus.
Madison County Circuit Judge Richard Tognarelli said jurors were right when they convicted Olutosin Oduwole in October of attempting to make a terrorist threat, a felony.
“The jury found that this was not a song. They found it was a threat, and I do not disagree with them,” the judge said of the case.
Oduwole stared blankly toward Tognarelli when the judge rejected the defense’s call for probation and ordered what he described as “appropriate” prison time. The sentence was well short of the maximum 15-year term prosecutors were seeking.



Tognarelli also sentenced Olutosin Oduwole to 364 days and a $1,000 fine on a related conviction of illegally having or storing a loaded pistol in his on-campus apartment the day he was arrested in July 2007, just months after the Virginia Tech rampage that left 32 people dead along with the gunman.
Tognarelli ordered the terms to be served at the same time, minus whatever time Olutosin Oduwole has already spent in jail. He rejected Oduwole’s requests for a new trial and release on bond pending his appeals, saying he still sees Oduwole as a public threat.
Oduwole was attending the Illinois school’s 13,000-student Edwardsville campus, northeast of St. Louis, when campus police found a piece of paper in his abandoned car, which they had impounded and was out of gas. The writing demanded payment to a PayPal account, threatening “if this account doesn’t reach $50,000 in the next 7 days then a murderous rampage similar to the VT shooting will occur at another highly populated university.