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By Newsweek Editors
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LADIES AND GENTLEMEN of the jury, have you reached the bar? Last Wednesday night rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg threw a bash for 100-odd guests, including some new and dear friends: about half of the 12 jurors who'd just acquitted him of murder. Guests at L.A.'s posh restaurant Monty's dined on lobster and filet mignon. Snoop's son, Corde, 2, danced on a tabletop. And the crowd was treated to an improvised rap by the rap star and his friend Tupac Shakur, who's appealing a sexual-abuse conviction. Later Snoop asked the crowd to give the jurors a round of applause--all took bows to a standing ovation -- then called juror number two up to the mike. Randy Maddix, a white, thirtysomething dormitory manager at UCLA, says he'd never heard of Snoop before the trial: "I thought he was Charlie Brown's friend." But on Wednesday, in front of the most successful rapper in the world, he performed a rhyme he'd been practicing all night, "Cut the Dogg Loose." "I thought it was sort of dope," Snoop, born Calvin Broadus, told NEWSWEEK. "I might even put it on my next album."
For a while, it was unclear if there'd be a next album. On Aug. 25, 1993, the rapper, 24, and his bodyguard, McKinley Lee, 26, were involved in a confrontation with gang member Philip Woldemariam, 20, in L.A.'s Woodbine Park. Defense lawyers acknowledged that Lee shot Woldemariam twice from the passenger seat of Snoop's Jeep Cherokee, but argued that he'd acted in self-defense. Last Tuesday Snoop and Lee were acquitted of murder. On Wednesday the jury deadlocked on charges of voluntary manslaughter, and the judge declared a mistrial. Prosecutors refused to comment on whether they'll retry the manslaughter case. Sources say it's unlikely, given that Los Angeles County is said to have spent nearly $1 million on the trial and that nine of the 12 jurors were prepared to acquit. Jurors say they were most impressed by the testimony of two of the dead man's friends, who admitted to removing his gun from the scene.
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In person, Snoop is surprisingly shy, and polite to a fault. During the trial the rapper was upbeat, spending his nights in the studio working on a new album, "Tha Dogg Father." Now that he's been vindicated, he'll proclaim his innocence in the media: "But I ain't doing no 1-800 s--t like O.J. because that was kinda whack. Every time I see O.J. on TV, I want to say, "Yo, homie, please go somewhere and sit down'."
Simpson never partied with his jurors, but Snoop saw nothing strange about mingling at Monty's: "They made the right decision, so why not party?" In truth, the people he really bonded with on Wednesday were family, not jurors. He held Corde in his arms, while his own father, Vernell Varnado, hovered nearby. "This is the best day of my life since leaving Vietnam," said Varnado, who quit his job in a Detroit post office to be with his son during the trial. "I am going to make sure my boy stays out of trouble, and only makes noise in the studio." Good idea. In the studio, Snoop is one of pop's best troublemakers.
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