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CHAOS IN COURT HALLWAY AFTER REMY MA SENTENCE
By Alan Feuer

Remy Smith, the hip-hop artist convicted in March of shooting a friend in an angry tug of war over a purse, was sentenced on Tuesday to eight years in prison at an emotional court hearing that touched off violence moments later outside the court.

Minutes after the sentence was imposed, in a hallway outside the courtroom doors, Ms. Smith’s fiancé, Shamele Mackie, flew into a rage, lunging and cursing at court officers, then overturning a garbage can near the elevator banks. Mr. Mackie shouted at the guards, “Go ahead, lock me up!” as a group of his friends surrounded him and forced him, flailing and howling, from the courthouse.

Tension had been building in Room 1123 of Supreme Court in Manhattan from the moment Justice Rena K. Uviller imposed the sentence and delivered a withering appraisal of Ms. Smith, calling her “an extremely angry young woman” who assumed herself to be beyond the rules of civil society.

Ms. Smith’s friends and family seemed aghast at that and began to weep and mutter as a large contingent of officers in the room stiffened visibly at their posts.

An angry crowd soon formed in the hallway around Mr. Mackie, a fellow rapper who was to have wed Ms. Smith on Monday at Rikers Island. The wedding was canceled when jail officials found a key on Mr. Mackie’s key chain that could be used to open handcuffs.

The officers tried to disperse the crowd, when Mr. Mackie, the rapper known as Papoose, tossed his baseball cap to a friend and lunged forward, reaching for the officers and shouting insults.

A court officer, who declined to give his name because he is not authorized to speak about security matters, said later that the detail had been ordered to proceed with caution because of Ms. Smith’s fame and her volatility.

Ms. Smith, who performs under the name Remy Ma, is known for her eye-catching outfits — on the day she was convicted she was wearing a version of a Little Miss Muffet outfit, gray bloomers and vest — but also for her easily available emotions, evidenced on Tuesday by the tearful statement she read to Justice Uviller.

In it, she excoriated some of the reporters who covered her trial for calling her a “hip-hop hellion,” saying her aggressive stage persona was precisely that: a “music industry creation” and “a facade.”

“Remy Ma is not even close to who I am,” she said through tears. “I’m not a thug. I’m not a hardcore anything. I have feelings and emotions, and I’m a human being like anybody else. I’m Remy Smith.”

Ms. Smith, 26, was found guilty on March 27 of first-degree assault for shooting Makeda Barnes Joseph, a member of her entourage, after a celebration of Ms. Smith’s birthday at a nightclub in the meatpacking district last July 14. At the party, Ms. Smith asked Ms. Joseph to hold her purse and said that when she got it back, $3,000 in cash was missing.

As they left the club, Ms. Smith pulled her Cadillac Escalade up to Ms. Joseph’s Nissan Maxima, then climbed into the Maxima with a cocked gun and tried to search Ms. Joseph’s purse for the money. During the struggle, Ms. Joseph was shot in the belly, and Ms. Smith fled in a taxi, abandoning her $69,000 Cadillac on the street and her victim in pool of blood.

In her own statement, read to the judge by Michael McIntosh, a prosecutor, Ms. Joseph, who was in the courtroom, said she was baffled how a night “so fun and enjoyable” could suddenly turn so violent. One minute she was hugging Ms. Smith, she said in her statement, and the next she was bleeding in a car.

“After July 14, I stopped existing as a person,” Ms. Joseph wrote. “I am now known as a victim, a gold-digger, a groupie, a liar and thief.” Her statement continued: “I will always be the girl they will whisper about. I will always be the girl who was shot by Remy.”

Before Ms. Smith sat down, she addressed herself to Ms. Joseph and spoke in her direction but did not look at her directly.

“I apologize,” she said, “and I’m sorry for not saving you. I feel so bad for all the physical and mental pain you went through, and go through. Myself, I have a lifetime scar on my face. So I know the pain you feel when I look in the mirror.”