Tekashi 6ix9ine, who has faced years of legal battles and stints in jail, was ordered held on home detention on Thursday after a fight at a Florida mall that broke the conditions of his probation, a Southern District of New York spokesperson told NBC News.
The rapper, whose real name is Daniel Hernandez, was arraigned in the Southern District of New York over the August mall fight and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery specification as part of his probation terms, according to a federal court docket.
Nick Biase, a spokesperson for the Southern District of New York, confirmed to NBC News that the guilty plea stems from an alleged fight in a Florida mall on Aug. 8. Biase said in a statement that Hernandez admitted that he and another person kicked and punched a third person “without having any legal justification to do so.”
In court on Thursday, Biase said prosecutors asked that Hernandez be held in jail pending his Nov. 4 sentencing on this specification and two others — two counts of misdemeanor drug possession that he pleaded guilty to in July.
Judge Paul A. Engelmayer instead ordered Hernandez to be placed on home detention and to be tracked by electronic monitoring.
"I think the judge made the right call just for the fact that he's pending sentence, it would have been too drastic of a remedy to put him in jail," Hernandez's lawyer, Lance Lazzaro, told NBC News in a phone call Friday.
Lazzaro stated that the fight was not a situation in which his client was looking for trouble, and maintained that Hernandez did not initiate the fight.
"He went to a mall with his family, and a person who had a gun threatened him and called him a snitch and started a whole situation," Lazzaro said. "He has to live every day with people doing stupid things to him and provoking him, which clearly was the case here."
The defense lawyer added that the fight started after the man taunted Hernandez over his role as a government witness, in which he testified against a gang he had once been involved with.
This person was "taunting him and threatening to kill him and harm his family and calling him a rat," Lazzaro said of how the fight was allegedly initiated.
Hernandez was sentenced to two years in prison in 2019 in a racketeering case after he pleaded guilty to charges that accused him of joining and directing violence by the gang Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods.
He was released from prison the following year, in April 2020, over concerns that his chronic asthma made him vulnerable to Covid-19. He was ordered to serve the remainder of his sentence on house arrest.
Hernandez stayed out of legal trouble until last fall, when he was arrested for violating the conditions of his supervised release. He agreed to another plea deal the following month and served a month in jail for violating probation.
That month in jail was followed by a month of home incarceration, a month of home detention — which can allow for more flexibility than strict house arrest — and a month of curfew, as well as electronic monitoring.
In July, he again admitted to breaking the rules of his supervised release by possessing drugs after his Miami home was raided in March.
Hernandez's criminal history dates back to at least 2015, when he was sentenced to probation for his involvement in a case involving a sexually explicit video of a 13-year-old girl.
