Snoop Doggy Dogg is arrested in connection with a Los Angeles homicide

Why it matters

September 9, 1993. Snoop Doggy Dogg, 22, and his bodyguard McKinley Lee were arrested in Los Angeles in connection with the killing of Philip Woldemariam, 25, two weeks earlier. Lee had been the shooter. The prosecution's theory was that Snoop, who was driving the Jeep Lee fired from, was an accomplice. The trial ran through early 1996. This is the case that defines what it meant to be a famous Death Row rapper in the mid-1990s. The case dragged on for two and a half years while Snoop made Doggystyle, while Doggystyle sold five million copies, while he toured, while he kept making videos, all under the looming possibility that he was going to prison for life. He hired Johnnie Cochran. The trial coincided with the OJ Simpson trial. Cochran got him acquitted in February 1996 of first-degree murder and second-degree murder, with the jury hanging on lesser charges (later dropped). Snoop has talked about the trial in interviews for the rest of his career. "Murder Was the Case" on Doggystyle is, in part, about it. You can hear the case in everything Snoop made from 1993 through 1996. The case was always in the room.