The rise and fall of Vybz Kartel......NEXT week Thursday the nation will know the fate of convicted entertainer Vybz Kartel as Justice Lennox Campbell will sentence him....Kartel faces the possibility of spending up to 50 years in prison.....Under Jamaican law, murder is punishable by death

BY KARYL WALKER Editor - Crime/Court Desk walkerk@jamaicaobserver.com  Sunday, March 16, 2014  

NEXT week Thursday the nation will know the fate of convicted entertainer Vybz Kartel as Justice Lennox Campbell will sentence him and his three co-accused.

After being found guilty of murder on Thursday, the glamourous side of the life of this controversial but phenomenal dancehall practitioner could be effectively over.

BOUNTY KILLER (Left) ... Kartel penned songs
 for him (right) KARTEL... ‘My Lord,
I bleach my skin and I am heavily tattooed’

Depending on whether or not Justice Campbell takes into consideration his attorney's expected plea for leniency, Vybz Kartel faces the possibility of spending up to 50 years in prison.

At the very least, he will have to spend about two years in prison until his appeal is heard.

If that appeal is unsuccessful, then in the best -case scenario, he will have to spend at least 15 years before being eligible for parole.

All that depends on the ruling of the judge.

Under Jamaican law, murder is punishable by death but that sentence has not been carried out since Stanford Dinnal and Nathan Foster were hanged on February 18, 1988 at the St Catherine District Prison.

But how did Adidja 'Vybz Kartel' Palmer come to this?

At the time of his arrest inside a hotel in New Kingston in 2011, he was at the top of his game and some sources said that he was earning more money than some of Jamaica's top executives with his music, which ruled the dancehall and the airwaves, Vybz Rum, condoms, cake soap, his line of shoes and his music production company Adidjahiem/Notnice Records.

This while not being able to ply his trade in the major markets of the United States and Europe.

According to his sister, Maureen Nelson, who is the vice-principal of a high school in Portmore, St Catherine, Adidja Palmer grew up in a home where discipline and education were instilled by his parents.

"They used to call us 'grille up' because when other children were outside running up and down we had to look out from behind the grille. Our father knew the importance of education and we grew up sheltered," Nelson said when she appeared in the Home Circuit Court last month to give character evidence on behalf of her accused brother. Adidja Palmer was born on January 7, 1976. more