Travis Scott is telling the Supreme Court that the use of a Black man’s rap lyrics in a Texas death row sentencing is unconstitutional.
On Monday (Mar. 9), Scott’s legal team (including Jay-Z’s longtime attorney Alex Spiro) filed an amicus brief to the highest court in the land in support of James Garfield Broadnax, convicted in 2009 of killing two men in the Garland area and later sentenced to death. The Texas-born Utopia artist highlighted the nearly all-white jury in the man’s case.
“The manner in which prosecutors presented rap lyrics written by petitioner James Garfield Broadnax, a Black man, to an almost all-white jury during his capital sentencing hearing presents an ideal vehicle for addressing this issue because the prosecutors’ conduct here was particularly egregious,” Scott’s brief reads. “The prosecutors argued Mr. Broadnax was likely to be dangerous in the future simply because he engaged in ‘gangster rap.’ Such an argument functionally operates as a categorical and straightforwardly unconstitutional content-based penalty on rap music as a form of expression.”
Scott’s Supreme Court brief goes on to include a reminder that rap lyrics, “historically associated with minority artists,” are protected by the First Amendment. Notably cited in the brief is this 2020 piece by Shawn Setaro for Complex focused on the New York City Police Department’s so-called “hip-hop police,” with the department’s unit provided as an example of the many ways rap artists have faced First Amendment infringements over the years.
The use of lyrics in Broadnax’s sentencing has also caught the attention of a number of additional artists—Young Thug, T.I., Killer Mike, and more—and music scholars, among others.
Underscored as especially troubling in a separate brief backed by Mike and others is the fact that Broadnax’s lyrics were not used during the determination of guilt phase of the legal proceedings.
“Instead, the State used Broadnax’s artistic expression in the punishment phase to portray him as living and pursuing a ‘gangster’ lifestyle that made him a continuing criminal and violent danger to the community,” reads that brief, first reported by the New York Times.
One point brought up by both briefs is that rap lyrics, specifically, have long been targeted and treated as directly autobiographical by the legal system. This runs counter to how similarly graphic works of art from other genres—like rock, for example—are typically treated.
This issue received a boost of public awareness in connection with Young Thug’s laborious YSL RICO case in Georgia. Amid coverage of that case, multiple artists—including Drake, Megan Thee Stallion, and Post Malone—backed a petition aiming to “Protect Black Art.”