The Kodak Black bail fight just escalated in Orange County, where his defense team says prosecutors sat on their hands so long that the rapper should walk free from every condition tied to his release.
Attorney David R. Bigney filed the motion Tuesday in the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court asking a judge to strip away every bond requirement still hanging over Bill Kapri, the rapper known worldwide as Kodak Black. The argument centers on Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.134(b), which requires the state to formally charge someone out on pretrial release within 60 days of arrest. Kapri was booked into the Orange County Jail on May 6 on a felony charge of trafficking MDMA, which put that deadline at July 5.
The motion states plainly that “no Information or Indictment has been filed” against him more than two weeks after that window closed. The bail motion puts real pressure on the state attorney’s office to either file charges soon or release him from every remaining condition.
Under the rule, a judge only has two options once that deadline passes. The defendant either walks free on his own recognizance once 63 days have run, or the state has to show good cause for tacking on 30 more days of supervision. Kapri’s team is not trying to poke holes in the trafficking allegation itself with this filing. This particular fight is only about whether the state met its own clock, and right now the record shows it did not.
Understanding how the bail amount got set in the first place matters here too. That trafficking charge traces back to a November incident near Mercy Drive and Fairvilla Road, when Orlando police responding to reports of gunshots found a BMW and a Lamborghini SUV surrounded by a small crowd. Officers said they smelled burnt cannabis coming from the BMW and found 56 grams of marijuana inside along with a metal container holding pills that tested positive for MDMA. The Lamborghini reportedly held another 28 grams of cannabis, plus a bag on the passenger seat containing close to 25 grams of a substance the Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed was MDMA that April, a weight well above the 14 grams Florida law treats as a trafficking amount.
A judge set Kapri’s bond at $75,000 in May, citing his prior felony record, and prosecutors pushed for even more. The state argued for a higher amount partly because “the defendant is a professional rapper,” a line his attorney shot down on the spot, telling the court that his client’s career gave prosecutors no legal footing to inflate the bond. Kapri posted the $75,000 the next day and walked out of jail.
His longtime attorney Bradford Cohen wasted no time going after the case once his client was free. Cohen called it a “ridiculous probable cause affidavit” and said in three decades of practice he had rarely seen one built on thinner ground, pointing to the fact that his client never touched the bag in question and was never inside the vehicle where it was found. That question of constructive possession is likely to define however this case eventually plays out in court.
The situation in Orange County is only one front right now. A little more than a week after that May arrest, Kapri turned himself in to the Broward Sheriff’s Office on charges of fleeing and eluding law enforcement along with resisting an officer without violence. That case stems from a February 27 traffic stop in Pompano Beach, when deputies tried to pull over a pink Jeep Grand Cherokee registered to the rapper. Court documents said Kapri initially stopped and stepped out to talk with the deputy, but the situation grew tense once two more vehicles showed up and the people inside claimed to be his security, with one of them visibly armed. As the lone deputy worked to manage the scene, Kapri reportedly got back in the Jeep and sped off. The arrest affidavit says he “proceeded to flee from deputies.” He is out on bond in that matter as well.
The history is a long one, stretching back years across multiple Florida counties. He was arrested in Broward County back in July 2022 on charges of trafficking oxycodone and possession of a controlled substance without a prescription, a case that followed him through missed drug tests, a positive fentanyl screening, and a court ordered stint in rehab. A separate December 2023 arrest in Plantation on an oxycodone possession charge was later dismissed after his defense produced a valid prescription. Kapri has also carried the weight of a federal case from 2019, when he pleaded guilty to lying on a background check form to buy handguns. Donald Trump commuted that three year sentence in January 2021 after Kapri had served about half of it.
For now, all eyes are on Orange County, where a judge still has to decide whether the state’s silence on formal charges earns Kapri a clean break from bond or just a short extension while prosecutors scramble to catch up. Either way, the Kodak Black bail outcome there won’t be the last word, since his lawyers have made clear this is far from the only courtroom where his name is currently on the docket.
