James Broadnax is scheduled to die on April 30th. And the fight to stop it just got very loud.
This isn’t just a celebrity cause-of-the-month situation. Travis Scott, Killer Mike, T.I., Young Thug, Fat Joe — these aren’t small names. They filed actual legal briefs at the U.S. Supreme Court asking justices to halt the execution of James Broadnax, a Texas man on death row for a 2008 double murder in the Dallas suburbs.
But here’s the thing: the reason they’re involved isn’t just about Broadnax. It’s about what happened inside that courtroom in 2009. Dallas County prosecutors pulled out 40-plus pages of Broadnax’s handwritten rap lyrics and basically told the jury — this guy is a monster. His own words prove it. One line went something like: “Hogtie ’em and body bag ’em / Send them to the mayor.”
And prosecutors used that as evidence of future dangerousness — which, under Texas law, is exactly what a jury needs to hear before they send someone to die.
His lawyers just said it straight in their Supreme Court petition: those arguments “exploited racial stereotypes commonly associated with rap lyrics and the Black community.” They’re not wrong. Nobody went after Johnny Cash when he sang about killing a man in Reno. Nobody dragged Bob Marley into court over shooting a sheriff.
But a Black 19-year-old writes the kind of dark, over-the-top storytelling Black artists have been doing forever — the kind of wild, dramatized bars that go back to the Jim Crow era — and suddenly it’s a death warrant.
Professor Erik Nielson — Andrea Dennis co-wrote it with him back in 2019 — Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America — told The Marshall Project that his research team now tracks a database of over 800 cases where rap lyrics were used as courtroom evidence. And he was blunt: there should “probably be at least one more zero after that,” because so many cases are just hard to find.
Eight thousand cases. Possibly. That’s not a quirk in the system. That’s the system.
Now here’s where it gets messy. Just last week, Broadnax’s own cousin — Demarius Cummings — confessed to the Dallas Morning News that he killed Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler. He said he let Broadnax take the blame. That’s the thing.
This case is way bigger than one man’s execution. Journalist Jaeah Lee already laid out in The New York Times how these prosecutions “contribute to racial disparities in the criminal justice system.” California and Louisiana have passed laws limiting how rap lyrics can be used in court.
Congress has floated bills to restrict use of “creative or artistic expression” against defendants in federal court. Even in Texas — a state that just denied Broadnax’s appeal — the Court of Criminal Appeals overturned another man’s sentence in 2024 because rap lyrics prejudiced his jury.
Anyway, Nielson made one genuinely wild observation: he thinks Donald Trump might actually be down for reform here, given his relationships with certain rappers. We’ll see about that.
The rap lyrics thing has always been a backdoor way to put a stereotype on trial instead of a person. Prosecutors know exactly what they’re doing when they read those verses out loud to a mostly non-Black jury. It’s not evidence — it’s theater. And the fact that it took celebrity filings to get the Supreme Court’s attention on this? That says everything.
Broadnax wasn’t famous when he was 19. He was just a kid with a notebook. And that notebook might get him killed.
What happens when the court doesn’t take the case — and the execution goes forward anyway?
F*ck you, he killed two people. Who gives a shit about his lyrics, he murdered people.
Get a life, fckin loser murder-apologist