Cop-Killing Rapper Cool C Gets Execution Date

Cool C certainly isn't the first rapper to get into serious trouble with the law. But he is easily the most prominent to be sentenced to death for his crimes. A price he will pay early next year.

Christopher Douglass Roney scored a hit in the 80s with 'The Glamorous Life.' After that he joined the Philadelphia-based hard hardcore group C.E.B., who had a couple singles on the rap charts.

But by 1996 he and C.E.B mate Steady B (William McClone) were trying their hand at bank robbery. It didn't go well, and as the two man plus another local rapper Mark Canty fled the scene they exchanged fire with the police, killing officer Lauretha Vaird.

Vaird was the first African American female officer to be killed in the line of duty in Philadelphia history. She was also the single mother of two, which made Cool C even less sympathetic when he went to trial.

Cool C was sentenced to death by lethal injection that year. However, as is often the case in death penalty sentences, it took almost two decades for him to get a fixed execution date. Bearing an unlikely pardon, C will die on January 8, 2015.

Although he has long maintained his innocence, eyewitness accounts as well as ballistic, foresenic and video evidence tie him to the crime.