Police critic Najee Ali sentenced to four years in prison for attempted bribery
Ali pleaded no contest to charges that he tried to bribe a witness in a court case involving his daughter. He has been outspoken on many issues, and once was famously scolded by LAPD Chief Bratton.
Activist Najee Ali, known as an outspoken critic of law enforcement, was sentenced to four years in state prison today after pleading no contest to trying to bribe a witness in his daughter's criminal case.
Ali, 45, was arrested and charged on March 11 with attempting to intimidate a witness and attempting to bribe a witness. The former gang member, now a community activist, allegedly tried to tamper with a witness outside his daughter's preliminary hearing at Alhambra Superior Court earlier this year, said Sandi Gibbons, a district attorney's spokeswoman.
The charges against Ali's daughter -- two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of leaving the scene of an accident -- stem from an incident involving her vehicle and a group of motorcyclists on the San Bernardino Freeway, Gibbons said.
Superior Court Judge Frederick R. Rotenberg sentenced Ali after the activist pleaded no contest to attempting to bribe a witness at the Alhambra courthouse. Prosecutors dismissed a count of witness intimidation. Immediately after the sentencing, he was taken into custody and placed in isolated detention at the downtown jail because of his notoriety, officials said.
Ali, born Ronald Todd Brewster, spent two years in prison for armed robbery before catapulting to prominence in 1998 when he helped mobilize public outrage over the case of Sherrice Iverson, a 7-year-old who was murdered at a Nevada casino.
Since then, he has emerged as an activist who transcends convention, protesting pornography in a Snoop Dogg video, urging blacks to work with police and speaking out on behalf of crime victims of every race.
Ali would have received two years in prison but "because he has a prior robbery conviction in 1992, it doubled in time to four years," Gibbons said. The judge also found that Ali violated his probation in a 2004 felony hit-and-run and perjury conviction and was sentenced to four years to run concurrently with the attempted bribery sentence.
"Mr. Ali has still not paid $29,240 in restitution in that case," Gibbons said.
In 2004, Ali was sentenced to five years probation and 1,000 hours of community service after he left the scene of a car accident. His vehicle had collided with another at Crenshaw and Martin Luther King boulevards, and he then ran into a nearby theater.
