NEW YORK — Trevell Coleman, known professionally in the rap music world as G. Dep, is best known for his hit songs 'Special Delivery' and ‘Let's Get It’. But his success was overshadowed by the overwhelming guilt he felt for shooting a man in 1993 and he decided one day in 2010 that he could no longer bear that burden.
Coleman, who joined P. Diddy's Bad Boy Records in 1998, was only 18 years old when he shot a stranger, in the chest with a .40-caliber handgun near the James Weldon Johnson Houses, located on Park Avenue and E. 114th Street in Harlem.
The case remained cold for 17 years until Coleman made the shocking decision to confess to his crime.
"I think I was just at a point, you know, where it was like enough is enough," Coleman told ABC News' Deborah Roberts from prison in 2013.
Coleman said he ambushed the man during an attempted robbery and then fled the scene. He wondered for years whether the man had survived the shooting. After a weeklong trial in 2012, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder. He was subsequently sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
At the end of 2023, after serving more than 13 years, G. Dep was shown mercy. With the original prosecutor's and judge's support, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul granted him clemency.
He walked free in April 2024.
"It's still things that I have to," Coleman said. "You know, I would like to give back to the society."
Coleman, at 50, is searching for a new beginning. He earned an associate's degree in prison and has the support of his wife, Laticia, and his adult children.
Coleman now works in music production at SCAN-Harbor, a nonprofit organization serving at-risk children and families in Harlem and the South Bronx.
He speaks to young people and shares his story to motivate them to avoid a life of crime, emphasizing the importance of staying out of prison.
"You take somebody's life like, what do you do to make up for that," Coleman told SCAN-HARBOR youth. "But, you know, all you can do is make steps toward it, you know, making it better."
While he now tries to help guide vulnerable kids down the right path, Coleman understands the harsh reality that many end up in prison — some even for life.
"Yeah, he did something wrong," Lew Zuchman, Scan-Harbor executive director, said. "But… that his conscience, which moved him to turn himself in, is very special to me. And I'm hoping that he can… really share this and explain this to our young people."
Federal and state officials have debated suitable sentences for youth offenders who have committed violent crimes, as has the Supreme Court in a series of rulings.
In 2012, Miller v. Alabama found that mandatory life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders was unconstitutional. Four years later, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Montgomery v. Louisiana that the 2012 Miller v. Alabama decision should apply retroactively to juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole.
Since the rulings, more than 1,000 juvenile lifers have been released. As of today, 28 states and Washington, D.C., have banned such sentences.
"I was a follower in a way," Coleman said. "Like, I learned that, you know, I wasn't really thinking and I wasn't really being an individual."
While Coleman and others were given a second chance, youth in other states have more challenges. Pennsylvania is one of the states where regulations for young offenders remain among the strictest, making advocacy even more imperative.
Pennsylvania had the highest number of so-called "juvenile lifers" of any state at the time of Miller v. Alabama, with the majority coming from Philadelphia.
In Pennsylvania, children as young as 10 can be charged, prosecuted, and convicted as adults. This is something that John Pace, a senior reentry coordinator at the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, highlights.
At the age of 17, Pace was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree homicide. He served 31 years and earned a college degree while incarcerated.
“The '80s was a time period in which the war on drugs was very prevalent,” Pace said. "It made it easy for legislators to create laws that would make it easy to prosecute young people as adults."
Pace now helps mentor incarcerated youth through the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project. One of those youths is 26-year-old Raequan Deal, born and raised in Philadelphia. In 2016, when he was 17, Deal was convicted of two felonies and served a total of twenty-two months in an adult county jail.
While incarcerated, Deal found support from the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, an organization dedicated to preventing children like him from being placed in adult jails and prisons and advocating for the release of "juvenile lifers."
"Being in jail was no fun place, it can make or break you. Luckily it made me, you know," Deal said. "So I kind of see though I went to prison, I came out as a better person."