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Some of the most famous rappers in the country — Travis Scott, Killer Mike, T.I., Young Thug, Fat Joe — filed briefs at the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month. They’re asking the justices to stop the April 30th execution of James Broadnax, arguing that his case exemplifies a larger problem in American courtrooms: The use of rap lyrics as evidence.
Broadnax was sent to death row for killing Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler while stealing their car in the Dallas suburbs in 2008. The celebrity involvement — not unusual in death penalty cases — may not even end up being the most talked about element in this case. Just last week, Broadnax’s cousin, Demarius Cummings, confessed that he killed the victims and let Broadnax take the blame, according to the Dallas Morning News.
But the rap question, should the Supreme Court take it on, could have sweeping implications across the country at a moment when prosecutors are bringing rap lyrics into the trials of more and more famous defendants, like Young Thug, Lil Durk and Drakeo the Ruler. (This also coincides with Afroman’s very entertaining victory last week against Ohio sheriff deputies in a defamation trial.)
Unlike these men, Broadnax was never famous. He was 19 when he was arrested, and at his 2009 trial, Dallas County prosecutors introduced more than 40 pages of his handwritten lyrics into evidence. (“Hogtie ‘em and body bag ‘em / Send them to the mayor / Then I bombed the whole country / Send the press, the paper.”) Broadnax’s lawyers say prosecutors violated his right to a fair trial when they portrayed his art as a literal admission of criminality. “These arguments exploited racial stereotypes commonly associated with rap lyrics and the Black community to transform Mr. Broadnax’s artistic expression into a death warrant,” his lawyers write in their Supreme Court petition.
The rappers’ brief sets the lyrics into a deeper history of Black artists whose work defiantly “reveled in exaggerated depictions of sex and violence,” from the toasts of the Jim Crow South to folk songs like “Stagger Lee” to the gangster rap of the 1990s. They describe how rap is held to a double standard compared with other musical genres: Nobody claims Johnny Cash killed a man in Reno or Bob Marley shot a sheriff.
The last decade has seen a growing movement of artists, scholars and lawyers pushing to ban various uses of rap lyrics in courtrooms. In 2015, Killer Mike, Big Boi and T.I. went to bat for the free speech rights of Taylor Bell, a Mississippi high school student, whose rap video included descriptions of violence against teachers accused of sexual harassment. He was suspended, and the rappers did not convince the Supreme Court to take the case.
In 2019, professors Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis published the landmark book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, analyzing how prosecutors use defendants’ lyrics against them, often as confessions to specific crimes. A few years later, journalist Jaeah Lee helped expand Nielson and Dennis’ database, arguing in The New York Times that these cases “contribute to racial disparities in the criminal justice system.” (There’s also a good episode of the podcast Hidden Brain on the topic.)
Nielson, the professor, told me his team of researchers and students now have a database of trials where rap lyrics were used, stretching back to the 1980s, with more than 800 cases, but “there should probably be at least one more zero after that,” given how hard it can be to locate them. He said social media has made it easier for anyone to publish music, but also for police and prosecutors to find it. Before the 2010s, police were finding cassette tapes among defendants’ belongings or snatching handwritten lyrics from jail cells, which is what happened to Broadnax.
Often, prosecutors use lyrics to prove someone committed a crime, but in Broadnax’s case, the lyrics served the cause of a harsher punishment. In Texas, death penalty juries must decide whether a defendant will be dangerous in the future, so prosecutors have broad leeway to paint the scariest portrait possible. Dallas prosecutors have argued that Broadnax’s lyrics “showed a stone-cold attitude toward his victims and the judicial process” and that his execution should go forward since he gave up earlier opportunities to contest how they were used.
Nielson told me that even if the Supreme Court sides with the state, and Broadnax is executed, a growing number of state lawmakers and judges — in both red and blue states — are trying to make it harder for prosecutors to use lyrics in court. In recent years, California and Louisiana both passed laws to limit the practice. Texas itself has an inconsistent record. The state Court of Criminal Appeals, which recently denied Broadnax’s arguments, overturned the sentence of a different man in 2024, over concerns that rap lyrics prejudiced his jury.
Another option is Congress, where lawmakers have floated bills to limit the use of “creative or artistic expression” against defendants in federal court. Nielson said he could imagine President Donald Trump being sympathetic to the idea, given his warm relationships with some famous rappers.