Sean Kingston’s mother, Janice Turner, has received her sentence four months after she and her son were convicted of fraud charges. On Wednesday, July 23, Judge David S. Leibowitz sentenced Turner to five years in prison and three months of probation during a federal court hearing in Miami.
In April, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Florida announced that Kingston and Turner had been convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Prosecutors said the two came up with a plan to fool several vendors into giving them $1 million worth of luxury cars, jewelry, and other electronics. Jurors took less than four hours to find Kingston and his mom guilty. Kingston will be sentenced next month.
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“I’m sorry,” 63-year-old Turner said to the judge before being sentenced, per CBS Miami. “My intention was to keep my son afloat in this difficult industry. They used him and abused him. I am begging for mercy for me and my son.”
Turner was taken into custody in May after a raid of a Southwest Ranches mansion rented by her son. A lawyer, Dennis Card, informed NBC 6 at the time that the raid has something to do with a case he filed against Kingston for purportedly failing to pay for goods acquired, including a 232-inch TV that Kingston was seen posing in front of in a photo.
The lawyer said, “He likes having bling, he likes showing off, he’s a showman. My client has a $150,000 television sound system that’s in there, there’s also about $1 million worth of watches that are in there, there’s a $80,000 custom bed that was ordered. This is an organized systematic fraud.”
“He’s got basically a script, he says that he works with Justin Bieber, and that he obviously puts on a big show here, this is a rental house, he doesn’t own it, and he lures people using his celebrity into having them release things without him paying for it and then he simply never pays,” the lawyer, who was representing the company suing Kingston, said.
“This is just an ongoing pattern for Sean,” the attorney further noted. He also claimed that the artist’s mother was implicated in the act.
Hours after Turner’s arrest, Kingston was also arrested while in the middle of performing one of his hits on stage, the Independent reported. The report said the singer was arrested “without incident” at the U.S. military training area of Fort Irwin, California.
