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BY PETER J. SAMPSON

Randy Manning is sentenced for the murder of aspiring hip-hop artist Rhian Stoute in Bergen County courthouse in Hackensack, on Friday, May 30, 2014.
A Brooklyn man convicted of firing four bullets into the head and neck of an aspiring hip-hop artist in Englewood, torching his body and dumping it in a car in Paramus was sentenced Friday to a life term in state prison.

Calling it a heinous crime, Superior Court Judge Edward A. Jerejian told Randy Manning, 33, that he will spend at least 65 years behind bars before becoming eligible for parole.

Manning’s public defender, Tana McPherson, urged the judge “to take a stand on the side of hope and redemption” by imposing a term of 30 years of parole ineligibility.

That would give Manning an opportunity “to go back out into world and redeem himself,” she argued. A longer term would be “very similar to a death sentence,” virtually assuring he will die in prison, she said.

Manning, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who previously lived in Englewood, declined to speak in his own behalf when asked by the judge if he had anything to say. He spent most of the hearing slouched in a chair, staring into a corner, seemingly ignoring the proceedings.

After a 24-day trial in Hackensack, a jury found Manning guilty on March 27 of murdering Rhian Stoute of Brooklyn on Aug. 15, 2011. Manning also was convicted of possession of a weapon, arson, desecrating human remains, hindering his own apprehension and prosecution and theft of the victim’s car. The judge imposed sentences totaling 34 years on those charges but said they will run concurrently with the life term on the murder count.

Stoute, who performed under the stage name “Kampane,” had set up his own recording studio in his basement and was trying to launch a career as a hip-hop artist when he was shot four times, two weeks before his 34th birthday, in an empty house on Tryon Avenue in Englewood.

“We are not here today for blood, we’re here for justice,” Danielle Grootenboer, the assistant prosecutor who tried the case, said in urging life imprisonment for Manning.

The prosecutor had told jurors in her closing argument that Manning killed the rapper because he resented his budding success.

“For him to shoot somebody in the face and head four times, leave him alone in an isolated house, then return to attempt to literally erase him from the face of the earth, this has to be one of the most vile and heartless murders this county has ever seen,” she told the court Friday.

Manning doused the body with gasoline and set it on fire, the prosecutor said. He later stuffed the badly burned body in the back of Stoute’s Chevrolet Tahoe, drove the vehicle to Paramus and abandoned it on a quiet cul-de-sac, she said.

Manning’s co-defendant at trial, Delroy Clarke of Englewood, was acquitted of charges that he helped Manning flee and concealed evidence, including the weapon. Clarke was alleged to have picked up Manning in Paramus and driven him to a taxi stand, where he took a cab to his home in Brooklyn.

Following his arrest, Manning confessed to the shooting and to burning the body, but at trial he testified that others, unknown to him, shot and killed Stoute.

– See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/brooklyn-man-gets-65-years-for-murder-of-aspiring-englewood-hip-hop-artist-1.1026711#sthash.FsWZBqFf.dpuf