Jailed reggae artist Buju Banton received positive news on Monday after Florida court jurors declared a mistrial in his felony drug case after four days of discussions.

Details on the mistrial landed online Monday (September 27) evening.

The Florida drug trial of Jamaican reggae artist Buju Banton ended in a mistrial on Monday when jurors said they could not agree on a verdict after three days of deliberations. The 12-member jury had been meeting since Thursday after a four-day trial at the U.S. Courthouse in Tampa. U.S. District Judge James Moody said a retrial would not begin until at least December. (ABC News)

Despite audio tapes, jurors could not reach a definite decision.

During the four-day trial which ended last week, prosecutors played audio recordings in which Banton, whose real name is Mark Myrie, and the informant discussed drugs, ideas for shipping drugs, and dollar amounts. Prosecutors said the tapes showed Banton wanted to finance drug deals. The 37-year-old performer testified he only talked about drugs with the informant in order to impress him. Questioned by Banton’s lawyer, the informant, Alexander Johnson, acknowledged Banton had never given him money. (BBC News)

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Turns out, you don’t always have to do the time just because you’ve done the crime.

Exhibit A: Paris Hilton, who despite pleading guilty to two drug bust-related misdemeanors this morning, skated away from the courthouse with absolutely no jail time to her increasingly tarnished name.

Hilton turned up for the brief hearing at Las Vegas’ Regional Justice Center—the same place O.J. Simpson was brought to justice, incidentally—bright and early at 7:30 a.m.

In the end and just as expected, her Aug. 27 bust resulted not in felony cocaine possession, but instead in blatant disregard of a Twitpic misdemeanor drug possession and obstructing an officer. The former charge is, of course, fairly self-explanatory. As for the latter, she’s getting slapped with that for her cockamamie story about the offending drug-possessing purse not being hers.

Spoiler alert: it was.

On both counts, Hilton was required to state exactly what she did wrong. For the first:

“Guilty, your honor,” she said. “I was in possession as well as tell an officer that the bag wasn’t my purse.”

When pressed to state for the record what, exactly she was in possession of, Hilton responded: “Cocaine, your honor.”

As for the second:

“Guilty, your honor,” she pleaded. “I said that the purse wasn’t mine to the officer, your honor.”

In exchange for her legal mea culpa, Hilton is expected to be sentenced to a year of informal probation (meaning she won’t have a probation officer to check in with), to complete an intensive outpatient controlled substance abuse program, pay a $2,000 fine ($1,000 per offense) and serve 200 hours (100 for each count) of community service.

“Ms. Hilton, you’re ordered to stay out of trouble,” Judge Bonaventura said.

“Any new arrests terminate your criminal probation and you will serve a one year sentence. The purpose of this is to change your conduct. I’m going to warn you, Ms. Hilton. You’ve now been sentenced to one-year in the Clark County Detention Center. The Clark County Detention Center is not the Waldorf Astoria. Take this seriously, Ms. Hilton.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama signed into law on Tuesday a bill to reduce the disparity between federal mandatory sentences for convictions for crack cocaine and the powder form of the illegal drug.

Obama had no comment as he signed in an Oval Office ceremony open only to news photographers.

The sentencing discrepancy has been a longtime irritant within the black community, a vital Obama constituency.

The quarter-century-old law that Congress changed with the bill Obama signed subjected tens of thousands of black cocaine users to long prison terms while specifying far more lenient sentences to those, mainly whites, caught with powder cocaine.

The new law is not retroactive and applies only to federal defendants, with no impact on state mandatory sentencing laws. Most drug arrests occur at the state level.

Monica Pratt, spokeswoman for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said the states generally have been ahead of the federal government in moving away from mandatory sentences in general.

And Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, said most states already treat crack and powder cocaine the same. The significance of the new law, he said, is that prosecutors sometimes kick cases up to the federal level to get harsher sentences, which now will be less likely to happen.

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International reggae superstar Buju Banton is facing the fight of his life with the revelation that United States drug enforcement agents have recordings of his participation in a cocaine deal.

Buju has been arrested on charges of dealing in illegal drugs and could spend more than 20 years in a federal prison in the US if he is found guilty.

The reggae star is scheduled to appear in court in Tampa, Florida, tomorrow for the first round of what attorney-at-law and University of Miami Professor David Rowe says could be a lengthy trial.

“I think that if he is intelligent and he approaches the case properly, he could get a result that would not end his career, and that would put him in a position where he might be able, in a relatively short period of time, to come out,” Rowe told The Gleaner yesterday.

The veteran attorney was responding to the affidavit made public yesterday by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

In the affidavit, the DEA alleges that Banton, whose real name is Mark Myrie, and two others “knowingly and wilfully conspire and agree with each other and with others unknown to possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of a mixture and substance containing a detectable amount of cocaine”.

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A former Montgomery County English teacher has been sentenced to six months in jail for distributing cocaine to a student.

Attorney William Brennan says his client Theresa Duarte apologized at sentencing Thursday to the Thomas S. Wootton High School community for the embarrassment caused by the crime.

Duarte, once called “the coolest woman alive” by students who put together a Wootton yearbook, pleaded guilty to distribution. Brennan said she provided cocaine to a student at her home.

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Two decades after customers clamored to buy cocaine from a teenager named John Cappas, they’re lined up again to buy what he has to sell: Hot dogs. The one-time “drug kingpin,” as the newspapers called him in the late 1980s, this summer became an owner of a hot dog stand called Johnny’s WeeNee Wagon.

It’s a few Chicago suburbs and a world away from where he ran the drug empire that made him $25,000 a week – enough to buy a house, fast cars and a necklace that spelled “Spoiled Brat” in diamonds to drape around his Playboy bunny girlfriend.

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D.C. germophobes may have something worse to worry about than swine flu on their dollar bills — like cocaine.

That’s right. According to findings released this week at an American Chemical Society conference, a whopping 95 percent of paper money sampled in the District was contaminated by cocaine. That ranked highest in the nation, along with Baltimore, Boston and Detroit. Overall, contamination throughout the country is at about 85 percent.

Apparently cocaine users like to roll up $5s, $10s and $20s, but don’t like to sniff with $1s or $100s. Granted, the cocaine isn’t coming just from people using the cash as a snorting device. It could come from your average, everyday drug deal, too. Drug dealers don’t wash their hands? No way…

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It almost seems impossible, but it’s tragically true. Scott Storch squandered $30 million. Not only that, he did it in less than six months.

“[It was] unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” the producer’s manager, Derek Jackson, told MTV News of his friend of almost two decade’s monumental fall. “Historical! It was historical without question.”

Storch’s decline started in 2006, which was arguably his most successful year creatively and definitely his most fruitful year financially. He was one of the top producers in the business, having worked on hits by Beyoncé, 50 Cent, the Game, T.I., Chris Brown, Christina Aguilera, Dr. Dre, Nas, Snoop Dogg, Pink and many others. He had a long way to fall.

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