Tupac Shakur, the rap star, was convicted yesterday of felony sex-abuse charges for groping a fan who went to his room at the Parker Meridien Hotel last year, but he was acquitted of the more serious charges of forcing the woman to have oral sex with him and his friends, and of weapons charges.
With his prominence in the music world and his repeated run-ins with the law, Mr. Shakur has become a symbol of "gangsta rap," a genre often criticized for its violent images and for what many feel is its degradation of women. He was not in the courtroom as the verdict was read yesterday, because he was receiving treatment for gunshot wounds he suffered early Wednesday in what the police said was a robbery. His lawyer, Michael Warren, would not say exactly where he was.
He faces a maximum penalty of 2 1/3 to 7 years in prison, while the most serious charges of which he was acquitted carry a maximum sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years.
His lawyer, while saying he would appeal the conviction, portrayed the verdict as a victory for Mr. Shakur.
"We're ecstatic that we had a jury with an open mind and a jury that scrutinized very closely the testimony of the prosecution witnesses, and for the most part found it completely incredible," Mr. Warren told a crowd of reporters outside the courthouse. Prosecutors had no comment on the verdict.
Mr. Shakur and his co-defendant, Charles Fuller, have acknowledged that they had oral sex with the Brooklyn woman -- the basis of sodomy charges against them -- but insisted that it was consensual.
The mixed verdict, and comments made by members of the nine-woman, three-man State Supreme Court jury, seemed to suggest a compromise by the jurors. The defense did not dispute during the trial that the defendants grasped the woman's buttocks and had oral sex with her. In its verdict, the jury apparently found that one set of acts was a crime, but that the other was not.
"That is the common ground that we could all agree on," said Richard Devitt, a juror.
The jurors would not say if their verdict meant they believed that the woman, 19 years old at the time of the incident, consented to sex with Mr. Shakur and his friends.
Mr. Shakur and Mr. Fuller were convicted of three counts of sexual abuse, and acquitted of two counts of sodomy, one count of attempted sodomy and three counts of criminal weapons possession. The weapons charges dealt with guns found in the hotel room.
Mr. Warren held out hope that Justice Daniel P. Fitzgerald might sentence the two defendants to probation. He and Robert Ellis, Mr. Fuller's lawyer, said they planned to appeal the convictions.
The jurors, who were sequestered during their three days of deliberations, said they were unaware that Mr. Shakur had been shot. Mr. Shakur, who checked himself out of Bellevue Hospital Center hours after the shooting, appeared in court yesterday morning, sitting in a wheelchair with his head and hand swathed in bandages, but jurors said last night that the brief look they had at him during the day had no effect on their decision. One woman on the panel said she did not even notice the bandages.
During the trial, Mr. Warren attacked the character and credibility of the woman who made the accusations, but the tactic may have had little effect. "It didn't carry any weight," said a juror, Deirdre Dunn.
When the charges were first filed, Mr. Warren said that Mr. Shakur, who is black, was the victim of racism, and that the authorities were out to get Mr. Shakur because of a lyric in one of his raps about killing police officers. Mr. Shakur made similar charges outside the courtroom during the trial.
But in the trial, before a jury that had two black members, race did not appear to play a role. The victim in the case, who was not in court today, is also black.
Mr. Warren said his client checked himself out of Bellevue because of "security problems" posed by the police at the hospital, but would not elaborate. He would not say yesterday where Mr. Shakur had gone for further treatment.
Yesterday morning, Mr. Shakur, smiling but looking drawn, appeared at the courthouse, surrounded by bodyguards, and refused to discuss either the case or the shooting. He was wheeled into the courtroom when the jury asked to have some testimony read back from transcripts. A few of the jurors nudged one another and gestured at him, obviously surprised to see him hurt.
In court, Mr. Shakur, wearing a black jogging suit, read newspaper accounts of the attack on him and chatted with Mr. Warren. He did not return to court in the afternoon because his wounded leg felt numb, a condition that required medical attention, Mr. Warren said.
Mr. Shakur remains free on bail. His next court appearance is set for Monday. No sentencing date has been set.
The case took an odd twist several hours before the verdict, when the Assistant District Attorney, Francine James, admitted that the prosecution had improperly withheld some evidence from the defense. Ms. James said that perhaps as long as a year ago, prosecutors misplaced some photographs of the woman Mr. Shakur was accused of sodomizing, and discovered them yesterday morning. She told Justice Daniel P. Fitzgerald that the prosecution would not object if he were to grant a mistrial.
But the pictures would not seem to have helped Mr. Shakur's case. They show the woman's breasts with scratches that she said she suffered during the attack at the hotel. The photos were taken at the District Attorney's Office the day after the attack, Ms. James said.
"The material was placed in a folder that was not specific to this particular case," a folder labeled "things to file," she said. "The pictures were discovered just this morning for the first time."
Mr. Warren did not ask for a mistrial, choosing to wait for the jury's verdict. The missing pictures could be the grounds for an appeal.
Mr. Devitt, the juror, said that if the jury had seen the pictures, "I don't think that would have made any difference."
Mr. Shakur became one of rap's biggest stars with his 1991 album, "2Pacalypse Now," and he has also appeared in the films "Juice," "Poetic Justice" and "Above the Rim."
He is one of the "gangsta" rappers, whose graphic lyrics about gunplay, crime and sex have gained numerous critics, from the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, to Vice President Dan Quayle. The genre's defenders say that rappers merely report what they see in America's cities.
As with some other rappers, for Mr. Shakur, tales of violent street life are not merely fodder for lyrics. He has been arrested several times, and was charged last year with shooting two off-duty police officers in Atlanta, though the charges were later dropped.
The trial that ended yesterday stemmed from a Nov. 18, 1993 encounter between a woman and Mr. Shakur and three other men in a room on the 38th floor of the Parker Meridien. The woman, who testified that she had had oral sex with Mr. Shakur at a nightclub four days earlier, told the jury that Mr. Shakur said he wanted to share her with his friends.
Mr. Warren argued that the sex was consensual, and that the woman made the accusations out of jealousy when she saw Mr. Shakur with another woman.
A third man, Jack Agnant, also known as Ricardo Brown, will be tried separately. The fourth man has not been found.
