Detroit rapper Tee Grizzley walked into an Ingham County courtroom Wednesday not to face a judge over new trouble, but to close the book on old trouble for good. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina granted a petition expunging the felony convictions the rapper, born Terry Wallace, picked up more than a decade ago — the same convictions that once put a rising accountant-in-training behind bars and, years later, launched his music career.
The expungement stemmed from a 2014 arrest tied to burglaries Wallace committed while attending Michigan State University, as reported by Metro Detroit News. According to Complex, those dorm burglaries involved roughly $20,000 in cash and stolen goods, along with an attempted jewelry store robbery in Kentucky, and landed Wallace an 18-month to 15-year prison sentence that he served until October 2016. Before his arrest, Wallace had grown up in West Detroit's Warrendale neighborhood and become the first person in his family in generations to enroll in college, where he was studying finance before turning to crime, Complex reports.
From Prison Release to Platinum Records
Wallace's path out of prison became the origin story for his rap career. On his first day of freedom in October 2016, he recorded the single “First Day Out,” which went viral and eventually earned a 6x Platinum certification from the RIAA, with more than 6 million units sold in the United States, per Complex's reporting. The song launched his commercial success as Tee Grizzley under label 300 Entertainment, turning a felony record into the backstory for a breakout hit.
But that same record followed him for years afterward. Tee Grizzley said his felony convictions had cost him performances, business opportunities, and access to certain insurance policies, according to Metro Detroit News. The practical toll of a felony record on a touring artist — blocked venues, wary sponsors, insurance hurdles — is a burden that rarely gets discussed alongside the music itself.
A Judge Known for a Much Different Kind of Case
Judge Aquilina, who granted the petition, gained international prominence in 2018 while presiding over the sentencing of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, a case in which she allowed more than 150 victims to deliver survivor impact statements, per The Metro Detroit News. Wednesday's hearing put her back in the spotlight for a far different reason: closing out a rehabilitation case rather than presiding over a reckoning.
The expungement hearing wasn't an isolated courtroom moment. Tee Grizzley was in Ingham County to speak to teenagers graduating from the county's juvenile weapons court program, a group of young people who had just traded their own felony weapons charges for misdemeanors after completing the program, according to WILX News 10. He encouraged the teens graduating from the program to use their second chance, the station reported.
Part of a Bigger Push to Clear Records Statewide
Tee Grizzley's own case landed at the intersection of two different paths toward a clean slate in Michigan. Since the state's automatic record-clearing process took effect in April 2023 under Michigan's 2020 Clean Slate legislation, authorities have expunged nearly 1.6 million criminal records for residents, according to Bridge Michigan. Under those statutes, misdemeanors clear automatically after seven years and eligible felonies after ten, but anyone seeking earlier relief, like Tee Grizzley, has to petition a circuit court judge directly rather than wait for the automated system.
In Detroit, a parallel municipal effort has been chipping away at the same problem. The city's Project Clean Slate initiative has expunged more than 15,000 criminal convictions for residents since its 2016 launch, including over 5,000 in 2024 alone, according to the City of Detroit. Tee Grizzley has previously taken part in local record-clearing efforts himself, joining Detroit officials at gun buyback events and expungement fairs in February 2024, per information cited in his Wikipedia profile.
The stakes of clearing a record go beyond a courtroom formality. A 2020 University of Michigan study found that people who obtain a criminal record expungement see an average wage increase of 23 percent within the first year afterward, according to Safe & Just Michigan. For a platinum-selling artist, the ledger includes lost gigs and insurance, but for thousands of ordinary Michigan residents going through the same process, the difference can mean access to jobs, housing, and financial stability that a felony record had kept out of reach.
