Rap lyrics on trial: How a verse becomes evidence, and the fight to make it stop

The prosecutor stands, holds up a sheet of paper, and reads a verse to the jury. No beat. No cadence. Just the words, in a flat courtroom voice, with every slur and every threat landing in silence. Then the line that does the work: These are the defendant's own words.

That scene is a composite, but it has played out in courtrooms across the country for three decades. The lyrics might come from a mixtape that sold forty copies, a video with ten thousand views, or a notebook seized in a search. They might have been written years before the crime being tried. They are read as if they were a diary, and the jury is asked to do something no jury is asked to do with a country singer or a novelist: treat a first-person artistic persona as a confession.

This piece is about that practice — what it is, how it started, what the research says it does to a jury, how drill and the camera phone made it worse, the Atlanta trial that put it on the national news, and the laws and bills written to stop it. It's also about the question underneath all of it, which is the one that reaches into what artists actually write: if a verse can be an exhibit, what does that do to the pen?

One note before we start. Several of the people in this story are alive, and some of their cases are still argued about. We're sticking to what was widely reported and keeping every defendant to the facts. None of this is legal advice.

The courtroom playlist

Researchers who track the practice — most prominently Erik Nielson, a professor at the University of Richmond, and Andrea Dennis, a law professor at the University of Georgia — have documented hundreds of criminal cases in which rap lyrics were introduced as evidence. Their 2019 book, Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, is the standard reference, and its central finding is simple: this happens to rap and, as a practical matter, to no other genre.

The lyrics get used in a few recurring ways. As a confession — the defendant rapped about a shooting, so the shooting in the indictment must be his. As motive or intent — he wrote about wanting revenge, so he had it. As proof of gang membership — the song names a set or a block, so he's in it. And, most loosely, as character — look at what kind of person writes this.

Evidence rules already contain a balancing test for material like this: a judge is supposed to weigh how much a piece of evidence actually proves against how badly it might prejudice a jury. The argument of the researchers, and of the lawmakers we'll get to, is that with rap lyrics the balance routinely tips the wrong way — because the lyrics prove little about the crime and a great deal about what a jury already fears.

Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno

Start with the double standard, because everything else follows from it.

Johnny Cash sang that he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Nobody charged him. Bob Marley sang that he shot the sheriff; the song is a staple of wedding bands. The murder ballad is one of the oldest forms in American folk music, and the first-person killer is its narrator by convention. Even inside hip-hop's neighborhood, Eminem's most violent fantasies sold tens of millions of records and were debated as art, not read into evidence.

When the New Jersey Supreme Court threw out a conviction in 2014 — we'll get to the case — it made exactly this point, observing that nobody assumes Bob Marley actually shot a sheriff or that Edgar Allan Poe buried a man beneath his floorboards. The court's reasoning was that fiction written in the first person is still fiction, and the law has always known that.

So why rap? Partly because rap's authenticity culture invites the reading — the genre's own rules reward writing that sounds real. But mostly because of who's writing it. The research covered below suggests that the same violent lyric is judged more harshly when it's labeled rap than when it's labeled anything else — which means the label is doing the work, not the words.

How it started

The practice has a prehistory in the culture wars. In 1990 a federal judge in Florida ruled a 2 Live Crew album obscene; members of the group were arrested for performing it and acquitted by a jury, and the ruling was later overturned on appeal. Two years later, political pressure forced Ice-T's "Cop Killer" off the Body Count album. Those fights were about whether lyrics were permissible. The next generation of cases would be about whether they were true.

Mac Phipps, 2001. McKinley "Mac" Phipps was a No Limit Records artist when he was convicted of manslaughter in Louisiana in 2001 following a nightclub shooting. The prosecution quoted his lyrics to the jury as evidence of his character and intent; reporting on the case has noted that lines from different songs were presented together. He was sentenced to 30 years, maintained his innocence throughout, was granted clemency in 2021, and walked out after roughly two decades inside.

State v. Skinner, 2014. Vonte Skinner was convicted of attempted murder in New Jersey after prosecutors read the jury pages of violent rap lyrics he had written — much of it before the shooting at issue, none of it mentioning the victim. In 2014 the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed the conviction, holding that the lyrics should not have been admitted without a strong, direct connection to the crime, and warning that such material is likely to prejudice a jury far more than it proves anything.

Between those two cases sits the pattern Nielson and Dennis document: the defendants are overwhelmingly young Black and Latino men, the lyrics are almost always from the genre's most violent registers, and the "evidence" very often predates the crime.

Rap on Trial: what the research found

The core experiment has been run several times since the late 1990s, and it keeps coming out the same way.

In the first version, a researcher took a violent set of lyrics from a decades-old folk song — a first-person narrator who shoots a lawman — and showed it to participants labeled as either country or rap. Same words. The "rap" version was rated as more threatening, more offensive, more in need of regulation. A 1999 study by the psychologist Stuart Fischoff ran a related design with mock jurors and a hypothetical defendant: participants who were shown violent rap lyrics attributed to him judged him more harshly on traits that had nothing to do with the crime. Later work by the criminologist Charis Kubrin and colleagues, including Adam Dunbar, repeated the genre-label design in the 2010s with the same result.

We're describing these in general terms on purpose — the percentages vary by study, and the point isn't any single number. The point is the direction, which has never reversed: tell people a lyric is rap and they read it as a threat; tell them it's country and they read it as a song. A jury given a defendant's rap lyrics is being handed a document that, by the research's account, makes him look guilty regardless of what it says.

Hip-hop's biggest names eventually took that argument to the top of the legal system. In 2019, a group of artists including Killer Mike, Meek Mill and Chance the Rapper filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of a Pittsburgh rapper, Jamal Knox, who had been convicted over a song that named police officers. The brief walked the justices through the genre's history, its conventions of persona and hyperbole, and the double standard. The Court declined to take the case. A few years earlier, in a 2015 case about threats posted online in the form of rap lyrics, the Court had reversed a conviction on narrower grounds while sidestepping the free-speech question entirely. The highest court in the country has, so far, left the problem to states and to Congress.

Drill, the camera phone, and the video as exhibit

Then the music changed, and the evidence changed with it.

Drill — Chicago's in 2012, then London's, then Brooklyn's — is first-person street reportage with the specificity turned all the way up: real blocks, real sets, real rivals, sometimes real dead. And it arrived with the camera phone. Drill's court controversies are part of the genre's story because the videos are the genre, and a video is a far richer exhibit than a lyric sheet. It shows faces, hand signs, locations, and who stood next to whom. Prosecutors stopped reading verses and started pressing play.

In the UK, the state went furthest. Courts issued orders restricting what some drill artists could rap about and, in some cases, requiring them to notify police before releasing music, and the Metropolitan Police had drill videos removed from YouTube in bulk. In January 2019, the Brixton duo Skengdo x AM received suspended sentences for performing a song in breach of a gang injunction — reported as the first time British artists had been sentenced for performing a song.

In the U.S., the cases arrived through social media. Bobby Shmurda, whose "Hot Boy" video made him famous in 2014, was arrested that December; prosecutors cited his lyrics and videos, he pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiracy and weapons charges, and he was released in 2021. Tay-K was convicted of murder in 2019 after a trial in which prosecutors played "The Race," a song he recorded while a fugitive. In Los Angeles, Drakeo the Ruler was acquitted of murder in 2019 in a case built heavily on his lyrics and videos, remained jailed facing a retrial on gang-conspiracy charges until taking a plea in late 2020, and was killed backstage at a festival in December 2021.

The through-line is that the same tools that let a rapper build an audience without a label — the phone, the upload, the aggregator page — also built the prosecution's file. Every video is a timestamped, geotagged statement, and the genre's own authenticity rules push artists to make it as real-looking as possible.

The 2020s flashpoint: Atlanta

The case that took the issue to the evening news came out of Atlanta. In May 2022, Fulton County prosecutors indicted Young Thug and more than two dozen others under Georgia's racketeering law, alleging that YSL, the label he founded, was also a criminal street gang; the indictment cited lyrics among its evidence. Before trial, the judge ruled that a limited set of lyrics could be introduced, conditionally, for the jury to weigh.

What followed became the longest criminal trial in Georgia history — jury selection alone ran roughly ten months — and it wound down in late 2024 in a run of pleas and verdicts. The trial's significance for this piece is narrower than its headlines: the biggest rap trial of the decade put "rap lyrics as evidence" into millions of households as a phrase.

The pushback

The response has been legislative: one state law, and proposals modeled on it.

California, 2022. The Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act (AB 2799), signed in September 2022, is widely described as the first state law of its kind. It doesn't ban lyrics from court. It requires a judge, before admitting creative expression as evidence, to treat it as having minimal value as proof of fact unless it closely tracks the actual crime, to weigh the risk that a jury treats it as proof of character or that it injects racial bias into the trial, and to do that weighing before the jury hears a word. In plain terms: the lyric now has to earn its way in, in front of the judge, before the jury hears it.

New York. A version known as the "Rap Music on Trial" bill passed the state Senate in 2022 but did not clear the Assembly that session.

Congress. The Restoring Artistic Protection Act — the RAP Act — was introduced in the House in 2022 by Representatives Hank Johnson and Jamaal Bowman and has been reintroduced since. It would amend the federal rules of evidence to create a presumption against admitting an artist's creative expression against them, with narrow exceptions. It has been introduced more than once, and that is as far as we'll go: it is a proposal backed by a music-industry campaign, and where it stands in Congress on any given day is something to look up, not something to take from an article.

The common logic of all three: not a ban, a burden. Make the prosecution show the lyric actually describes the crime — this date, this victim, this detail — rather than letting a genre label do the proving.

What it means for the pen

Here's the part that reaches into the booth.

The thing that makes a verse land is specificity. Write better verses teaches the name-the-street rule for a reason: "the block" is forgettable and "the corner of Fifth and Hill at 2 a.m." is a movie. The whole craft pushes toward detail, toward the first person, toward sounding like you were there. And that is precisely the writing that reads best to a jury as confession. The rule that makes bars land is the rule a subpoena exploits.

There's a related tension in the genre's oldest weapon. The diss track runs on specific, checkable claims about a real person; lyrics-as-evidence runs on treating specific claims as checkable facts about the author. The culture has always understood the first as sport. The courtroom hasn't learned to tell them apart.

Working artists have adapted in ways you can hear. Some lean harder into obvious persona — Detroit's scam-rap lane is the clearest modern example of a sound whose characters are unmistakably characters. Some talk openly about writing with a lawyer's ear, blurring names and dates on purpose. Some refuse to change a word, on the argument that the moment you write for the prosecutor, the prosecutor has already won.

What shouldn't change is the pen itself. Persona is not a loophole; it's the form. The narrator of a street record is a character the way the narrator of a crime novel is a character, and the right answer to a system that can't tell the difference is to fix the system, not to flatten the art. In the meantime, keep your receipts — the session dates, the files, the drafts that show a verse was written as a song — because the clearest defense of a lyric is the paper trail that proves it was one.

The competition judges the song

A fan-voted competition is the opposite of a courtroom in one specific way: nobody is asked to decide whether you meant it. Real fans hear a record and vote on whether it moves them. The character you wrote is judged as a character; the beat, the voice and the writing get judged as craft. What the platform's rules actually ask of a lyric is that it be yours and that it be clear of the rights of other people — not that it be a sworn statement.

So write the character. Name the street if the song needs it. Keep the receipts. And when the record's ready, enter it somewhere the only verdict is the crowd's.

—

Related:

• What is drill music? From Chicago to London to Brooklyn — the sound that went global
• The art of sampling: The breaks, loops, and legal wars that built hip-hop