After languishing on dying row in Texas for almost 20 years, James G. Broadnax was once achieved on April 30, 2026.
In 2009, a just about all-white jury convicted him of theft and double homicide. Broadnax’s legal professionals believed the preliminary rejection of all Black applicants from the jury pool was once unconstitutional. In addition they believed it was once unconstitutional that prosecutors used 40 pages of Broadnax’s handwritten lyrics, which they characterised as “gangsta rap” that doubled as a “self-admission” of Broadnax’s legal “mentality.”
The lyrics proven to the jury weren’t offered right through the section of the trial that decided Broadnax’s guilt for theft and homicide. They had been offered most effective right through the sentencing section, when the jury regarded as whether or not he will have to obtain the dying penalty.
In 2025, I revealed “Being Dope: Hip Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir.” The ebook makes use of prose and lyrics to discover commonplace misconceptions about rap and rappers. Together with the way in which lyrics proceed for use to demonize folks outside and inside the court docket – in ways in which no different artwork shape has to cope with – I spotlight how “rap” is frequently used as shorthand for violence, medication and criminal activity.
When rap lyrics transform dying sentences
In 2019, Erik Nielson, a pupil whose paintings makes a speciality of using rap song as proof in legal trials, co-wrote “Rap on Trial” with criminal pupil Andrea Dennis. Within the ebook, Nielson and Dennis spotlight a trend of prosecutors treating rap lyrics as confessions or proof of reason, even if they’re normally fictional or exaggerated. In the meantime, even if different artwork paperwork mechanically contain characters, lyrics or imagery that depicts violence, they’re hardly ever used as proof of guilt within the court docket.
Dennis and Nielson, who’s a signatory on some of the amicus briefs that was once filed in toughen of Broadnax, care for a database of over 800 instances wherein lyrics had been used as proof.
It comprises some well known instances, however lots of the entries within the database contain individuals who don’t seem to be neatly referred to as rappers.
As an example, right through the final arguments within the trial of Dominique Inexperienced, Texas prosecutors learn aloud graphic lyrics from a Geto Boys tune. Inexperienced hadn’t written the lyrics, and there was once no transparent connection between him and the tune. Critics like Nielsen say the transfer was once supposed to form how the jury perceived Inexperienced, who was once sentenced to dying in 1994 and achieved in 2004.
Broadnax met a equivalent destiny. Whilst top on PCP and marijuana, he’d to begin with confessed to the killings of Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler within the Dallas suburbs in 2008. He later retracted his confession. In March 2026, Broadnax’s cousin and co-defendant, Demarius Cummings, signed a sworn remark admitting to pulling the cause to kill Swan and Butler. Cummings have been attempted one after the other and had already won lifestyles with out parole.
Cummings mentioned that he to begin with went together with Broadnax’s confession, however after 17 years – and finding out in February 2026 that his cousin can be achieved – he felt pressured to proper his earlier statements.
Proof corroborates Cummings’ admission. His DNA was once discovered at the grip of the homicide weapon and at the clothes of some of the sufferers. Broadnax’s DNA was once no longer discovered on both.
Regardless of a flurry of last-minute appeals and amicus briefs, the state achieved Broadnax.
From ‘Jim Crow’ to ‘authentically’ Black
Personally, the willingness of courts to simply accept rap lyrics as proof emerges from standard leisure’s long-standing deployment of damaging stereotypes about Black folks.
Within the U.S., minstrel presentations had been a number of the first extensively standard varieties of mass leisure. Performers had been frequently white individuals who donned blackface to mock Black folks thru tune, dance and slapstick comedy. Characters like Thomas Rice’s “Jim Crow” hired tropes of Black folks as buffoonish, lazy and lascivious – stereotypes that underpinned the racist criminal code of segregation that got here to be referred to as Jim Crow regulations.
Along criminal segregation, separate and unequal classes emerged for Black song. In 1920, Mamie Smith launched “Crazy Blues,” the 1st industrial blues recording via a Black artist. Recordings like Smith’s had been cordoned off into their very own separate class, referred to as “race records.” In 1942, Billboard started charting every other invented class that it dubbed the “Harlem Hit Parade.” Black song would cross directly to be referred to as, at quite a lot of issues, “rhythm and blues,” “soul” and “urban contemporary” into the Seventies.
Those genres helped marketplace this song as “authentically” Black. I take advantage of quotes as a result of I argue that those genres have all the time mirrored the target market’s listening practices and expectancies, up to the rest actual or distinctive about Black folks.
A boogeyman for The usa’s ills
Through the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, rap song was once likewise pigeonholed as a “Black” style. And “gangsta rap” quickly emerged as a subgenre that was, for some listeners, an efficient stand-in for the entire purported ills that plagued Black communities.
N.W.A. rapped about police brutality, violence and poverty, amongst different subjects. Tracks like “F— Tha Police” had been lyrically provocative and confrontational.
MC Ren and Eazy-E of N.W.A. carry out right through a display in Milwaukee in June 1989.
Raymond Boyd/Getty Pictures
When Milt Ahlerich, an assistant director on the FBI, despatched a letter to N.W.A.’s document label caution that the monitor may just result in disrespect and violence in opposition to legislation enforcement, the troupe noticed a advertising alternative, occurring to gloat that they had been “the world’s most dangerous group.” And plenty of audiences went directly to interpret their tracks as documentary proof of on a regular basis Black lifestyles. If truth be told, I argue that this broader interpretation of rap song led, no less than partially, to the fervour with which the general public to begin with supported the so-called “war on drugs,” which ended up disproportionately focused on Black communities in puts like Decatur, Illinois, the place I grew up.
Even if artists cross to nice pains to differentiate their artwork, many audiences merely need to consider all rap song and rap artists had been doing and pronouncing the similar issues. Their unwillingness to interact past the skin manner a refusal to inspect rap’s layered explorations of lifestyles, satisfaction and ache, described thru lyrical humor, social observation and witty wordplay.
As Rolling Stone journalist Ed Kiersh wrote in 1986, “To much of white America, rap means mayhem and bloodletting.”
‘Being Dope’ is non-public
For me, that is non-public. I’ve been a rapper all of my skilled lifestyles. In “Being Dope,” I write about educating highschool in Springfield, Illinois, the place a neighborhood radio host used my song to check out to color me as unprofessional or worse, and referred to as for me to be fired over it.
I made up our minds to pursue a Ph.D. and find out about the rhetorical attraction of rap song. I wrote a rap album as my dissertation, and after changing into a professor of hip-hop, I revealed the first-ever peer-reviewed album with an educational press.
Rap has many purposes. It’s a day-to-day apply undertaken via extraordinary folks, no longer simply those who goal to be well-known. After I speak about the general public belief of rappers, I spotlight how I proceed to grapple with the uneasiness my identification as a rapper can elicit in other folks. I additionally center of attention at the tales of buddies and members of the family, in addition to folks like Willie McCoy, Eric Explanation why and Jordan Davis – Black American citizens whose deaths had been blamed on rap song, a type of scapegoating I name “rapwashing.”
So once I see “rap” or “rapper” in a headline to indicate guilt or impress damaging associations, I’m reminded of the reality in Kiersh’s remark. It’s much more troubling when rap lyrics are used to lend a hand ship a dying sentence.
Gangsta rap’s effectiveness as a prosecutorial instrument, just like the minstrel presentations prior to it, relies on audiences mistaking cool animated film for authenticity, and hinges on listening to inventive expression as documentary proof of legal movements. The use of gangsta rap to justify state-sanctioned executions most effective extends the darkish legacy of Jim Crow into the prevailing.
