Rapper Kodak Black due in court in Florida on felony drug charge

Kodak Black, the Florida-based rapper, was scheduled to appear in court in Orlando on Thursday on a felony drug charge stemming from an incident last year in which gunshots were allegedly fired near a children’s educational building.

The musician, who has a long history of arrests and was sentenced to a three-year prison term on a firearms charge in 2019 before being pardoned by Donald Trump, turned himself in to the Orange county jail on Wednesday, multiple media reports said.

An arrest warrant states that the 28-year-old, whose real name is Bill Kahan Kapri, engaged officers who responded to a report of gunfire near Children’s Safety Village in November.

Police said they arrived to find a number of people surrounding two SUVs, a Lamborghini and a BMW. Officers smelled cannabis and found during a search “a pink pill” weighing about 25mg that tested positive for methylenedioxymethamphetamine, the synthetic psychoactive drug known as MDMA.

The pill was allegedly inside a pink bag with documents bearing Kapri’s name, along with $37,000 in cash, the warrant states. The rapper initially denied the bag was his, according to the Florida department of law enforcement (FDLE), then tried to get officers to hand him the money, insisting it belonged to his business.

Kapri is charged with one felony count of trafficking MDMA of less than 200mg, which has a mandatory minimum prison sentence of three years, a maximum of 30 years, and a fine of up to $50,000.

Brad Cohen, Kapri’s lawyer, told TMZ that his client’s arrest had a “weak legal basis” common to his previous legal encounters.

“We look forward to yet another fruitful resolution to another case that should have never been filed,” he said.

According to Cohen, Kapri was not a passenger in either car and his fingerprint found in the bag was on a bottle of prescription cough medicine that he had every right to have touched.

The podcast host Loren LaRosa, a former TMZ journalist, posted on X that Cohen told her: “Kodak was allegedly not in possession of any drugs and that the charges will not stick”.

She said the attorney asserted that Kapri was not in the car at the time of the search, or any time that officers witnessed; that he was not in possession of the bottle at the time of the search; and that while he may have touched it, it was never in his possession.

The post, however, made no mention of the MDMA pill that led to the charge against him. The Guardian has approached Cohen for comment.

Trump’s pardon of the rapper in January 2021, along with other Black celebrities including the Grammy-winning singer and producer Lil Wayne, was one of the final acts of the president’s first term of office.