Legal Debate on Using Boastful Rap Lyrics as a Smoking Gun
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — The case had gone cold.
Four years after the 2007 murders of Christopher Horton, 16, and Brian Dean, 20, detectives here had little to go on.
No
suspects. No sign of the gun used to shoot the men. No witnesses to the
shooting outside a house where officers found Mr. Horton sprawled next
to a trash can and Mr. Dean on the front porch.
But in 2011, the case was reassigned to a detective who later came across what he considered a compelling piece of evidence: a YouTube video of Antwain Steward, a local rapper with the stage name Twain Gotti, performing his song “Ride Out.”
“But
nobody saw when I [expletive] smoked him,” Mr. Steward sang on the
video. “Roped him, sharpened up the shank, then I poked him, 357 Smith
& Wesson beam scoped him.”
Mr.
Steward denies any role in the killings, but the authorities took the
lyrics to be a boast that he was responsible and, based largely on the
song, charged him last July with the crimes.
Today,
his case is one of more than three dozen prosecutions in the past two
years in which rap lyrics have played prominent roles. The proliferation
of cases has alarmed many scholars and defense lawyers, who say that
independent of a defendant’s guilt or innocence, the lyrics are being
unfairly used to prejudice judges and juries who have little
understanding that, for all its glorification of violence, gangsta
rappers are often people who have assumed over-the-top and fictional
personas.
In
the profane world of hardcore rap, verisimilitude is prized. Growing
out of the housing projects and ghettos on the West Coast in the 1980s,
gangsta rap made the gritty reality of gangs, violence and drugs central
features.
And law enforcement took note. In a 2006 article
distributed to prosecutors, an F.B.I. analyst recommended looking for
rap lyrics when searching homes and jail cells because of their
potential as leads.
Mr.
Jackson, who investigated gangs as a prosecutor, said such lyrics can
be useful in building a case, because the search for status — attaining
it, crowing about it, expanding it — is integral to gang life. “If you
listened to the songs,” he said, “you would literally hear gang members
confessing to crimes they had committed previously and were
disseminating it within the neighborhood.”
In
New York, detectives monitor rap videos on YouTube to study the pecking
order on the streets and grudges between gangs that might have spurred
crimes.
Most
rappers charged in recent cases have been amateur performers who aspire
to fame, even though gangsta rap is no longer as popular as it was,
having been supplanted by more mainstream party music.
Critics like Andrea L. Dennis,
an associate professor of law at the University of Georgia, say law
enforcement ignores the fact that rappers do not necessarily live the
lives they sing about.
Rick Ross,
for example, took his stage name from a West Coast drug kingpin of the
1980s, Freeway Rick Ross. When he broke through as a performer in 2006,
his streetwise image and rhymes about the Miami gangster lifestyle
seemed like references to a shady past. In reality, he had once been a
corrections officer.
A brief filed in the Skinner case by the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union turns to “Crime and Punishment” and “Folsom Prison Blues” to make a similar point. “That a rap artist wrote lyrics seemingly embracing the world of violence is no more reason to ascribe to him a motive and intent to commit violent acts than to saddle Dostoyevsky with Raskolnikov’s motives or to indict Johnny Cash for having ‘shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.’ ”
A brief filed in the Skinner case by the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union turns to “Crime and Punishment” and “Folsom Prison Blues” to make a similar point. “That a rap artist wrote lyrics seemingly embracing the world of violence is no more reason to ascribe to him a motive and intent to commit violent acts than to saddle Dostoyevsky with Raskolnikov’s motives or to indict Johnny Cash for having ‘shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.’ ”
