Juvenile Not Delinquent

[Damien J.]

Juvenile was there but he didn't wreck the joint.

After a weeklong trial, a Florida jury ruled in favor of the Project English rapper Thursday, determining that he didn't cause a police officer's knee injury when she helped break up a scuffle that Juvenile took part in back in 1999.

Melissa Huxley-Bujeda was off-duty on July 23, 1999, when she was called to issue a trespass warning to Juvenile and some of his friends at the Regency Square mall in Jacksonville. According to Huxley-Bujeda's lawsuit, the group had been asked to leave the shopping center because their clothes and behavior were in violation of mall policy.

When they were told to hit the road, the suit stated, Juvenile and his crew let loose some swear words, prompting security to call for the plaintiff. During the small-scale brawl that ensued, Huxley-Bujeda said, she injured her knee while trying to restrain Juvenile.

The New Orleans native, whose real name is Terius Gray, was arrested at the scene for disturbing the peace and violently resisting an officer; the charges were later dropped.

Huxley-Bujeda sued Juvenile in 2003, claiming that she had had four surgeries on her knee since the incident, costing her $68,635 in medical bills.

Juvenile's lawyer in turn argued that Huxley-Bujeda suffers from degenerative arthritis and had injured her knee nearly 35 times playing sports when she was a child.

"It was a travesty of justice," her attorney, Fred Abbott, said Thursday about the ruling, adding that their camp will move for a new trial or file an appeal. "One day justice will prevail."

If you ask Juvenile, though, justice has already had its day.

"We got them, we got them, we got them," the platinum-selling rapper said. "Just the fact that it's a rap artist against the police, that never happens. Rappers never win. We never win against the police or the government."

And Juvenile has been on that losing side before.

He was arrested in January for contempt of court after failing to appear in an ongoing child support investigation. Police released him after he submitted a DNA sample for a paternity test.

Juve was also arrested in 2003 on child abandonment charges after allegedly failing to pay support for his daughter, who was six months old at the time.

The artist's latest album, Reality Check, debuted at number one on the Billboard charts in March, boosted by the lead single "What's Happenin'," which took aim at the U.S. government's response, or lack thereof, to Hurricane Katrina. Juvenile's Louisiana home was destroyed by the catastrophic storm.

This report is provided by E! Online