@meghannmcuniff: Rapper Yella Beezy's lawyer began his opening statement in his murder-for-hire trial yesterday by reminding jurors, "Your sole responsibility as jurors in a case is to require the state of Texas to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt." "Any reasonable doubt, any alternate fact to a fact they have to prove to get this case that is not ruled out through the evidence in this case. If there's one left, if there's 20 left, if there's 30 left, it's your duty to find the defendant not guilty," said Toby L. Shook, co-founding partner of Shook & Gunter in Dallas, Texas. Beezy, legal name Markies Deandre Conway, is accused of paying $40,000 to the gunman who killed rapper MO3 aka Melvin Noble, who was shot dead on a Texas freeway on Nov. 11, 2020. A separate jury last month convicted Kewon White of being the gunman, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Shook said in his nine-minute opening that Beezy withdrew $40,000 nine days after the shooting that he gave to his friend Jerry Johnson, but the money is not the same cash that White had when he was arrested with guns and $9,700 after driving 107 mph. "There's 354 five-dollar bills. There's 66 one-dollar bills. There's 102 10-dollar bills. That's not the money that Marquise Conway withdrew. That's drug money. We learn from the evidence that Keynon White works with Jerry Johnson, he works in the drug house on Ramona. They're doing drug transactions all the time. You'll look at that money; it's not fresh out of the bank," Shook said. "That's their theory, but that's one of the reasonable doubts you're going to hear about that they cannot rule out," he said. Shook said White "will appear unhinged." "He's going to be seen running down I-35 at noon onto oncoming traffic. You will hear evidence that he wanted to be accepted, and that he worked at that drug house for Jerry Johnson, and he wanted to be part of that group. And he's violent, and he has a temper, and he may want to do things just to please people, but that never was investigated in this case because within a few days, the Dallas Police Department had its theory as to how this happened," he said. #law #crime #court

Meghann Cuniff

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Thursday 29 October 2026 04:09:18 GMT