James Broadnax has been locked up in a 6ft-by-10ft cell on death row in Texas for more than 16 years, and in that time he has developed coping mechanisms for passing the long and desolate days.
A favourite technique is to write spoken word poetry at his cell desk. He becomes so engrossed in the creative process that he can lose himself for hours, transfixed in what he calls a “time gap”. In one of his recent poems, featured in a short death row documentary, Solitary Minds, Broadnax, who is 37, describes how he writes:
“I’ve been here umpteen days never forgetting
To forget the absence of my fate.
Sloppy ciphered sentences become rage,
Provoking thoughts into words spoken
Across this blank page.”
Though his love of writing has remained constant, the form of Broadnax’s poetry has changed over the years. Today it is spoken word, but as a teenager back in the aughts it was rap. Broadnax’s dream was to become a successful rapper. He would fill entire notebooks with handwritten rap lyrics. Next month, that old habit could cost him his life.
Broadnax is set to enter the execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas, on 30 April. He will be strapped to a gurney and injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital – his life snuffed out in no small part because of the prosecutorial use, or misuse, of his poetry. In 2009, Broadnax, who is African American, was convicted along with his cousin of murdering two white men, Matthew Butler and Stephen Swan, during a robbery in Garland, Texas. He was found guilty by a jury from which Dallas county prosecutors had initially excluded all Black jurors, until the trial judge stepped in and reinstated one of them.
During the sentencing phase of Broadnax’s capital trial, prosecutors presented the jury with 40 pages of the defendant’s notebooks found in a suitcase after his arrest. The state carefully selected rap lyrics infused with violent images of murder, robbery and drugs, to make the case that Broadnax should be sentenced to death. Its lawyers skirted over lyrics addressing peaceful narratives such as redemption and love. For the ultimate punishment to be secured under Texas law, jurors would have to be persuaded that the defendant posed a threat of “future dangerousness”.
“Fade ’em, fade ’em,
Tape ’em up. I hit ’em later.
I am so high up and cloud proof, like a skyscraper.”
Those lyrics were among several read out in court from his notebooks as critical evidence, prosecutors claimed, of Broadnax’s “gang mentality”. In closing arguments, the state said that his “gangsta rap” writings proved just that – that he was a member of a criminal gang and a “psychopathic killer” whose lyrics were a literal homicidal master plan. “The root word of gangsta rap,” the lead prosecutor told the jury portentously, “is gangster.” To seal the deal, Broadnax was labelled “the worst kind of predator”, like those “we like to watch on Animal Planet”.
By leaning heavily on rap lyrics and racist dog whistles, Texas prosecutors managed to drown out mitigating evidence that might have spared Broadnax’s life. His defense lawyers emphasised that Broadnax was just 19 when the murders took place. He had endured an abusive childhood at the hands of a grandmother who locked him up in his room without food and frequently beat him. And despite such a traumatic background, he had no previous criminal record other than a single conviction for non-violent marijuana possession.
The jury was clearly less swayed by such details than by the prosecutors’ lurid invocation of the rap lyrics. Jurors asked to see the notebooks twice during their deliberations. Then they sent Broadnax to death row.
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Kevin Liles is a luminary of the rap world with a storied 40-year career. He rose from intern to become president of the ultimate hip-hop label, Def Jam Recordings (among its signings are Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, and on and on). Until last year, Liles was CEO of the record label 300 Entertainment, whose roster has included Megan Thee Stallion, Mary J Blige and Young Thug.
For the past three years Liles has redirected his energies from recording artists to protecting them from the criminal justice system. He leads a non-profit, Free Our Art, whose mission is to shield artists from what he sees as gross infringements of their first amendment rights to free expression. “My imagination shouldn’t be an indictment,” he told the Guardian. “My creativity shouldn’t be a crime, my art shouldn’t be used as evidence.”
For Liles this is personal. In 2022, 300 Entertainment was distributing Young Thug (real name Jeffery Williams) and his record label, YSL Records, when the rapper was arrested on racketeering charges relating to alleged membership in a criminal street gang and other crimes. The following year the trial judge ruled that Young Thug’s lyrics and music videos could be admitted in evidence. It later transpired that many of the lyrics cited by prosecutors had not even been written or uttered by the rapper.
Young Thug recorded a response for his fans from jail. “This isn’t about me or YSL,” he said. “I always use my music as a form of artistic expression, and now I see that Black artists and rappers don’t have that freedom.” He was released in 2024 on time served, having spent two years behind bars, after he pleaded guilty to some charges.
Liles spearheaded protests from the music industry against the use of Young Thug’s art in court. When he heard about the impending execution of Broadnax in Texas, similarly involving rap lyrics presented as supposed evidence, it drove his mission to a new, vastly more urgent level. “I haven’t seen anything so egregious in this space,” Liles said. “A young man sentenced to death based not on evidence, but on allegations that he was a ‘future threat’ because of his rap lyrics. If the supreme court does not intervene, we’re actually going to put a kid to death based on his lyrics.”
Getting the supreme court to intervene to stop Broadnax’s execution is now Liles’s top priority. The condemned man’s lawyers have filed a petition to the nine justices of the court arguing that Texas’s use of Broadnax’s lyrics was a violation of due process and equal protection enshrined in the eighth and 14th amendments of the US constitution. To support that appeal, Liles helped assemble a group of 16 prominent creative artists that included Young Thug himself and other top rappers such as Killer Mike, T.I. and Fat Joe, as well as the Black-ish actor Anthony Anderson.
Working alongside a slew of art organisations and academic experts, the artists joined what is known as an amicus brief lending their voices to the petition now before the supreme court. In the supporting brief they quote lyrics written and performed by artists in other musical genres that have been treated as works of imagination and entertainment without attracting the gaze of prosecutors. “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” sang Johnny Cash in Folsom Prison Blues, without anyone accusing him of being a murderer. Then there’s I Shot the Sheriff, by Bob Marley and later Eric Clapton, two artists who avoided being cast as cop killers in real life. “For that matter, no one ever assumed that Hall & Oates were stalkers; Beyoncé stole a Lexus; or the Trammps burned down buildings,” the brief says.
Yet as another key figure behind the amicus brief, Erik Nielson, told the Guardian, rap has from inception been treated differently. “This only happens to rap music. No other fictional form, musical or otherwise, has been targeted and criminalised in this way.” He added: “You have to work really hard not to see race as the central factor in all this.” Nielson, a liberal arts professor at the University of Richmond, has been studying the uses and abuses of rap lyrics by prosecutors for almost 15 years. He co-wrote the definitive book on the subject, Rap on Trial, and maintains the most comprehensive database of cases where rap lyrics have been used as evidence, usually in criminal courts.
The database records 826 cases from the late 1980s to today. Among them are 33 cases in which rap lyrics were admitted into capital trials that ended in death sentences, though some were later reversed on appeal. Of the 33 death sentences, 10 came from Texas, where Broadnax is on death row. They include Dominique Green, who was executed by Texas in October 2004 despite pleas for clemency from the South African leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the victim’s family. Green admitted being present at a robbery, but insisted he did not pull the trigger. To counter his defense, prosecutors read out the lyrics from a Geto Boys song that Green had quoted in a letter to a co-defendant. “I’ll forever be trigga happy,” the lyrics said.
Tedderick Batiste is another in the database from Texas. At 38, he has been on death row for almost 15 years for a 2009 murder committed during an attempted robbery. In a chilling echo of Broadnax’s fate, prosecutors recited Batiste’s jailhouse rap lyrics to the jury during the trial’s sentencing phase. The scenario he conjured up in his poetry of a shooting – “I popped and he dropped” – was used to persuade jurors of his “future dangerousness”, and they duly returned the death penalty. “It all boils down to the same thing,” Nielson said, reflecting on his years-long study of the subject. “It’s this largely intentional misreading of rap music, treating it as literal fact, as autobiography, and denying it the status of art.”
A separate supreme court amicus brief has been filed in the Broadnax case by the Houston, Texas-born rapper Travis Scott (AKA Jacques Webster). He points out that hip-hop and rap were criminalised almost the moment they emerged from the south Bronx in the late 1970s. “Despite rap’s enduring popularity and critical respect, it has long been subject to suppression and surveillance,” Scott writes. He provides the justices with a potted history of hip-hop and rap. From humble beginnings, born at a Bronx block party, it exploded into “the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts”, rising in cultural recognition to a level where Kendrick Lamar could be awarded the Pulitzer prize in music in 2018.
As the “war on drugs” escalated through the 1980s, east coast rappers such as Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, and NWA and Ice-T on the west coast, gave rap a sharper edge. They grew into both chroniclers of a country in which by 1995 one in three Black men aged 20 to 29 were in the grips of the criminal justice system, and a channel of protest against police brutality. West coast groups went further, developing the subgenre of gangsta rap, which painted a cinematic picture of badass larger-than-life characters immersed in sex, drugs and violence. It didn’t take long for law enforcement to take notice. Fuck tha Police, a protest song about police racial profiling from NWA’s 1989 debut album, Straight Outta Compton, prompted the FBI into handing the group a warning letter.
When Ice-T, as a member of Body Count, released the 1992 song Cop Killer, in which he imagines shooting an officer (although he has always insisted it was a protest record), it provoked complaints from then president George HW Bush and a campaign by local police forces across the US to have it removed from shelves. Ice-T (Tracy Marrow) highlighted the surreal side of the nationwide outrage by comparing his art to that of David Bowie in his song Space Oddity. “If you believe I’m a cop killer, then David Bowie is an astronaut,” he said. As if to ram home the point, Ice-T went on to play an NYPD officer in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
It was the NYPD that first turned moral hysteria about rap into an institution, creating in 1999 a unit that became known as the “hip-hop police” and later “rap unit”. Its officers opened files on Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent and others, sharing them with forces around the country. Jay-Z complains in his memoir that he was followed around by the same “hip-hop cop” for seven years. The NYPD’s controversial history as the scourge of hip-hop and rap artists is ironic given that the city’s current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, himself dabbled with a hip-hop career as a young New Yorker under the stage name Young Cardamom.
The force still maintains a specialist division to this day, known as the Enterprise Operations Unit, though it has dropped its fixation with hip-hop and no longer considers lyrics sufficient grounds for action. The unit is tasked with investigating entertainers and venues that have been connected with acts of violence in the past, with the aim of pre-empting future trouble. In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson stressed that it operated “regardless of music genre”.
Following quickly in the slipstream of police departments came the prosecutors. The earliest case listed in the Rap on Trial database is from 1990, when Derrick Ragan was prosecuted for a double murder in Pennsylvania and sent to death row. Ragan unsuccessfully appealed against prosecutors’ use at trial of rap lyrics from his group the Plush Brothers, which were used as evidence of his homicidal character. In 2020 his death sentence was commuted to life without parole on unrelated grounds.
As the huge global commercial success of rap accelerated, so too did the appetite of prosecutors. Juries, especially white ones, proved willing to accept rap lyrics as proof of nefarious purposes. In doing so they were in tune with general popular opinion. A 1996 study by Indiana University compared people’s reaction to rap lyrics, performed primarily by Black artists, with a predominantly white musical form, country music.
A sample group of 118 white people was assembled in a mid-sized south-western US city. Researchers presented them with the lyrics from a 1960s Kingston Trio folk song, Bad Man’s Blunder, that relates the story of a man who kills a police officer. A subset of the group were informed that the words were rap lyrics. A second subset were told the exact same words came from a country song. When each group was asked to rate the lyrics on grounds of offensiveness, whether they posed a threat to society and whether a warning label should be attached to them, the group perceiving them to be rap was notably more critical than the group thinking they were country music. “The exact same lyrical passage, which is acceptable as a country song or when associated with a White artist, becomes a dangerous, offensive song in need of government regulation when it is a rap song or associated with a Black artist,” the researchers concluded.
On the back of such ingrained bias, prosecutors spotted a golden opportunity and developed a strategy accordingly. In 2004 the American Prosecutors Research Institute released its manual on how to prosecute gang cases titled “what local prosecutors need to know”. It instructed: “Through photographs, letters, notes, and even music lyrics, prosecutors can invade and exploit the defendant’s true personality.”
By the time of Broadnax’s trial in 2009, “gangsta rap” had effectively ceased to exist. It had fragmented into regional versions, from trap music in the south-east to drill in Chicago. Yet it was still powerfully invoked at the sentencing stage of Broadnax’s trial. Meanwhile, the number of cases recorded in the Rap on Trial database continues to grow. Since 2010 there has been an uptick, fueled by social media, which offers detectives an easy route to surveil rappers through their posted videos. “Prosecutors definitely don’t care what the music is labeled or depicted as,” Nielson said. “If the lyrics suit their purposes, they will use them.”
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With Broadnax’s scheduled execution now four weeks away on 30 April, his lawyers are vesting great hope in their last-minute supreme court appeals. In addition to the petition over rap lyrics, they are also objecting to the prosecutors’ initial dismissal of all Black candidates from the jury pool, which they say was blatantly unconstitutional. There was a connection between these two forms of alleged prosecutorial misconduct, said Sheri Johnson, a law professor at Cornell University. “If you want to make a racist argument about a defendant based on their rap lyrics, then you want a white jury to listen to it.”
On 18 March, Broadnax pursued another last-minute push for a stay of execution that addresses the question of innocence in his case. His legal team petitioned a state court seeking a new trial after his cousin and co-defendant, Demarius Cummings, who is serving a life sentence, signed a sworn declaration saying he alone shot the two victims. The petition argues that the jury would not have found Broadnax guilty of capital murder, or have sentenced him to death, had they known he was not the triggerman. It also points out that DNA recovered from the murder weapon and one of the victim’s clothing matched Cummings’s genetic profile but not Broadnax’s.
As these appeals play out, Broadnax is aware that the clock is ticking. His fiancee, Tiana Krasniqi, a UK-based lawyer, talks to him daily. She said he was coping. But he has “his moments of doubt and fear”. The couple are set to get married on 14 April, two weeks before Broadnax’s scheduled execution date. The ceremony will be officiated at the Polunsky unit, which houses death row, with the couple marking the marital kiss through bullet-proof glass.
As he tries to steel himself in the gathering storm, Broadnax has turned to an old source of comfort. He is writing poetry again. Krasniqi shared five of his recent poems with the Guardian. In them, he dwells on the theme of natural beauty, evoking dreamscapes of sunlight and breeze passing through the trees. There is also something darker: death and destruction hover over him. “The spirit of the wind always weeps dead leaves,” he writes. “One life, one chance to see it crash around me.”
In a poem titled Same Trees, the Black death row inmate facing execution partly on the back of his rap lyrics alludes to racial lynchings.
“So pour out some liquor because these are my homies –
All of my brotha’s
All of my sistah’s
Swingin’ from those same damn trees … ”
