On this wet, rainy day, I look at my blog backlog and ask the hard questions. Today: why did California ban rap music as evidence in criminal trials?
Is it the obvious answer?
Hey yo cop pigs,
This ain’t no kinda threat
Because I set my bars to rhymes
Not a warning that I’m blakk.
And if you think I suck as a rap artist…
California restricts use of rap lyrics in criminal trials after Gov. Newsom signs bill
h ttps://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/california-restricts-use-rap-lyrics-criminal-trials-gov-newsom-signs-b-rcna50271
By Variety, 30 September 2022
In a big win for creative expression, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed The Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act, which restricts the use of rap lyrics as evidence in court in California.
They got soooo close to the acronym DACA!
In August, the Calif. Senate and Assembly unanimously approved the bill, AB 2799. Speaking to the importance of the legislation at a virtual bill signing ceremony were rap artists Killer Mike, Meek Mill, Too $hort, Ty Dolla $ign, YG, E-40 and Tyga, as well as CEO of the Recording Academy Harvey Mason Jr.
Killer Mike is happy that his lyrics will not be admissible in court. Hmm. Nobody ever accused ghetto culture of being subtle.
In a press release, the Black Music Action Coalition called the bill a “crucial step in the right direction” of not injecting racial bias into court proceedings, especially given the recent indictment of Young Thug and Gunna, whose lyrics were directly quoted and used against them in an ongoing RICO trial.
If you’ve wondered why such degenerate trash as rap music remains popular, the answer… as usual for clown world… is money laundering. Rap artists are notorious for being connected to the drug trade. How does a dealer put all that cash in the bank without any red flags? By purchasing his cousin’s music albums.
Don’t be too smug about your own culture, whitey. The Deep State has been doing the same thing for the same reason with postmodern artwork. You know, the stuff that looks like fingerpainting by a crack addict? Because it is?
“For too long, prosecutors in California have used rap lyrics as a convenient way to inject racial bias and confusion into the criminal justice process,” said Dina LaPolt, entertainment attorney and co-founder of Songwriters of North America. “This legislation sets up important guardrails that will help courts hold prosecutors accountable and prevent them from criminalizing Black and Brown artistic expression.
However did artistic expression result in a RICO trial?
Young Thug’s Indictment Quotes His Own Lyrics. Here’s Why That’s Controversial
h ttps://www.billboard.com/business/legal/young-thug-indictment-quotes-lyrics-controversial-1235069258/
By Bill Honahue, 10 May 2022
Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Lamar Williams, was arrested Monday after a grand jury returned a 88-page indictment against him, Gunna, and 26 of others alleged members of Young Slime Life, a purported street gang that prosecutors say wrought “havoc in our community” since 2012.
Another Saturday night in the ‘hood. If Lamar has the subtlety of naming himself Young Thug and his gang Slime Life, then there’s every chance that he’d base his rap music on his own, actual murders.
In technical terms, Young Thug stands accused of both participating in an illegal gang and conspiring to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – a state version of the federal law that’s been famously used to target the mafia and other large criminal enterprises.
To bring a RICO charge, prosecutors need the show the various individual actions that contributed to the overall criminal conspiracy. The indictment handed down this week had no shortage of such “overt predicate acts” allegedly committed by the various YSL members, including murder, carjacking, armed robbery, drug dealing, illegal firearm possession and litany of other wrongdoing.
But at least five of the acts listed in the indictment were just examples of Young Thug’s music.
In one song cited by prosecutors called “Slime Shit,” the rapper said: “I’m in the VIP and got that pistol on my hip, you prayin that you live I’m prayin that hit, hey, this that slime s—.” In another passage cited in the indictment, Young Thug rapped in 2021 that “I killed his man in front of his momma, like f— lil bruh, sister and his cousin,” and “my trigger start itching.” Some of the lyrics made direct reference to YSL, but many others didn’t. In the case of each quote, prosecutors called it “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
The boldfaced is Lamar continuing to NOT be subtle.
The indictment often directly quoted from Young Thug’s music, like a 2018 video in which he rapped, “I never killed anybody but got something to do with that body.” Prosecutors claim such statements were made “in furtherance” of the gang’s criminal enterprise.
If Slime Life members were purchasing Young Thug’s music with their drug money so the bank wouldn’t ask questions, then yeah, that’s furtherance of a criminal enterprise. WHAT DID I JUST WRITE?!
So, out of an 88-page indictment they found some rap music references that actually mention gang members and their activities. And that’s a bad thing somehow.
“The tactic denies the artistic heritage, nature, and value of rap music, and strips the work and authors of all creative effort, as well as internal and external context that should inform one’s understanding of the music,” said Andrea Dennis, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law who co-wrote a book on the subject, in an interview with Billboard earlier this year.
Nothing helps me understand rap music like reading the contextual indictment. Here’s another one!
Fight over rap lyrics at New York murder trial
h ttps://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/news/fight-over-rap-lyrics-york-murder-trial-174742777.html
By Tom Hays for AP, 29 April 2014
NEW YORK (AP) — When he wasn’t busy being what prosecutors portray as the ruthless leader of a violent drug gang, Ronald Herron was moonlighting as a rapper known as Ra Diggs.
Herron’s gritty body of work, including music videos with titles like “Live by the Gun, Die by the Gun,” has become a point of contention as his murder case nears trial in federal court in Brooklyn. Jury selection began Tuesday.
Spoiler, he’s now doing life in prison.
In one video, Herron brags about wearing body armor, saying, “I’m gripped up, I’m vest upped … I’m ready for war man, on all fronts.” Both sides are awaiting a ruling on whether the government can show jurors portions of that recording and 12 others gathered during the investigation of a narcotics dealing enterprise.
It’s a legal question that isn’t isolated to Herron’s case.
In another case ending in a conviction last year, a Manhattan judge allowed prosecutors to show amateur rap video starring a defendant charged in a string of armed robberies, agreeing that it was evidence he had access to guns.
That’s hard to argue with. Also, that’s not the lyrics, that’s a photo of the perp holding a gun.
In the Herron case, prosecutors allege he lived his lyrics in a criminal career that began with his arrest as a teenager on robbery and weapons charges. By the late 1990s, he rose to a leadership role in a Bloods faction called the Murderous Mad Dogs that sold crack cocaine out of a housing project in his Brooklyn neighborhood, they say.
If the rap lyrics can be linked to a specific event, why should they not be admissible?
In 2001, Herron was charged in a fatal shooting. He was acquitted of murder but convicted of drug possession and sent to prison until 2007, when he went back to his neighborhood, reclaimed his turf and resumed killing rivals, prosecutors say.
One of the killings was payback for the 2009 shooting of one of Herron’s top lieutenants, nicknamed Moose, authorities said. Herron chased the shooter into the courtyard of a housing project and pumped several bullets into him, they said.
A video from a documentary-style series titled “Ra Diggs TV” shows the wounded Moose recovering in a hospital bed and talking to Herron about the fate of the man who shot him. Herron is heard saying, “See you soon at a cemetery near you, man.”
That counts as a specific event…
The defense has argued that the videos are fictional works of art expressing the 32-year-old Herron’s views on the hardships of inner-city life.
…and therefore NOT fiction.
Among the Ra Diggs rhymes cited by defense papers: “I ain’t working no slave at no age … And it’s like in this day and age, if I ain’t get paid, then the hammer’s getting cocked and something’s getting spray.”
Maybe vague threats shouldn’t be considered valid artistic expression. More than that, laziness CERTAINLY shouldn’t. Is it good, beautiful and/or true?
…eh, might be true. If hard time at Riker’s counts as laziness.
Comparing the videos to Johnny Cash singing in “Folsom Prison Blues” that he “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” the lawyers argued that their client’s recordings “cannot be fairly construed to mean the words express admissions of personal conduct, acts or even the author’s true beliefs.”
Well… if Johnny Cash had lived in Reno at the time, and was affiliated with a violent street gang called the Boogaloo Butchers, whose leader was nicknamed Mutha Fukka, and the police had an unsolved homicide that matched the rap song’s depictions… and Johnny waved a gun in the music video of the same caliber as the murder weapon… then maybe Johnny would have been indicted.
I love how Cadence Weapon answers his own question with a mug shot.
It’s the same old story everywhere in Clown World. These people are not sophisticated, neither Derp State nor Slime Balls. They’re scum, they’re insultingly obvious scum, and like the Watergate Scandal, the coverups are even worse than the crimes.
But we aren’t able to do anything about it.
Aren’t allowed, more like, and the more this goes on, the more I sense a spiritual wager at work a la Job. Testing how we react to various trials, how capably we run through the mouse mazes of unreality.
If you’re disheartened by the increase in wickedness, look at it this way: reality exists for YOU. To test you, develop your character, prove to the spiritual realm who you really are. These primates such as Ra Diggs and Young Thug? They’re nothing. They’re props on the stage of life, of no further interest to Christ, and the more they get celebrated and protected, the more I expect the other shoe to drop.
Even so, such wagers feel like a waste of time. God is omniscient; He’s got to know what my reaction would be to Mutha Fukka trying a home invasion on me. I would invite him to tea, play a Johnny Cash song to comfort him because Negroes all know who Johnny Cash is, and discuss ways that he might artistically express himself other than stealing loot that’ll just get spent on rap music.
There have been cases where the rap song had details about crimes.
Reported last year, there were at least three dozen cases in the past two years alone where rap lyrics were included in criminal cases. Virginia rapper Twain Gotti was arrested for a double homicide based on lyrics.
It is important that the event must be clearly tied to the rap lyrics. At the outset I am very uncomfortable with using any lyrics as “evidence”… but when a clear connection is made to the crime, how is it not evidence? It can’t be treated like a legitimate, voluntary confession of crimes, but it certainly can be a piece of evidence in a trial. Why not?