The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up a death row challenge to a Texas prosecutor’s use of a Black defendant’s rap lyrics against him during a sentencing hearing.
Lawyers for James Garfield Broadnax argued that he shouldn’t be executed Thursday because prosecutors allowed his rap lyrics to be read before the jury as evidence of violent behavior. They said it unjustly prejudiced the jury against their client.
The jury asked twice to review the lyrics while deliberating Broadnax’s fate.
“These arguments exploited racial stereotypes commonly associated with rap lyrics and the Black community to transform Mr. Broadnax’s artistic expression into a death warrant, and, even more troublingly, fit into a broader pattern of racially charged prosecutorial practices and arguments throughout Mr. Broadnax’s trial,” the lawyers argued.
Broadnax was 18 when he robbed and murdered a White man and White woman in 2008 in Garland, Texas.
Texas officials argued that the high court should not intervene in the execution, stating that the rap lyrics were found in two spiral notebooks in a suitcase in the victims’ car.
A portion of the rap lyrics referred to the crime: “Send da press, send da paper. Hold up. Stop N rewind [t]hat s—- I’m about [to] tell a little story [why] I’m in this b——- Yeah, I hit the lick, but the reason I got caught cuz the n——- snitching s—-. Now this b——- [illegible] me, I got two counts of murder. I might go to trial and tell the Judge I’m going to [murk] because I’m JB, b——-. Do you know who you f——— wit?”
The justices, without comment, declined to take up Broadnax’s plea to consider his case.
It would have taken four justices to vote in favor of hearing the dispute for oral arguments to have been granted and for his execution to be paused.
