Scholarship Library

The Culture Not Evidence Scholarship Library is a curated collection of research, articles, and legal scholarship at the intersection of rap, criminal law, evidence, and racial justice.
The goal of the Scholarship Library is threefold:

to support defense lawyers by providing authoritative sources to cite and ideas to develop strategies in cases where prosecutors are using their clients’ rap expression as evidence;
to support academics, journalists, and students in advancing the conversation about race, hip-hop, art, evidence, and criminal law; and
to amplify the voices of scholars and practitioners who are fighting against the criminalization of hip-hop expression.

Rap on Trial, the treatment of rap music as evidence in the American criminal legal process, is well- documented and increasingly scrutinized. Research has shown that – with little restraint – police, prosecutors, probation officers and judges use rap lyrics to investigate, prosecute and punish individuals. Less noticed is that a similar phenomenon is occurring in the American K–12 educational system, which disciplines school-age youth who participate in rap culture and sometimes refers them to the juvenile or criminal legal systems for additional punishment. This article describes and analyses a small set of identified cases of this scenario, demonstrating that rap music is used to funnel youth, including vulnerable Black and Brown youth, into what has been coined the school-to-prison pipeline and exposing the extreme dissonance between hip hop and the educational system.

This article “imagines the institution of punishment in the hip-hop nation.” Professor Butler’s thesis is that “hip-hop can be used to inform a theory of punishment that is coherent, that enhances public safety, and that treats lawbreakers with respect.”

What happens, however, when the court admits as criminal evidence statements the defendant made in an artistic context rather than as a result of everyday conversation or speech? This Article tackles this question in the context of defendant-authored rap music lyrics. Part I documents the admission of rap music lyrics composed by defendants as substantive evidence in criminal cases. Part II seeks to debunk the judicial assumptions revealed in Part I by discussing the commercialization of the rap music industry, notions of authenticity in rap music, and the poetics (i.e., artistic conventions) of rap music lyrics. Part III applies the information from Parts I and II to demonstrate that defendant-authored rap music lyrics are of questionable evidentiary quality. Finally, Part IV suggests a framework that may be employed when evaluating the admissibility and credibility of lyrical evidence.

Rap lyrics have been introduced by prosecutors to establish guilt in criminal trials. Some fear this form of artistic expression will be inappropriately interpreted as literal and threatening, perhaps because of stereotypes. This article reports on three experiments that examined the impact of genre-specific stereotypes on the evaluation of violent song lyrics by manipulating the musical genre (rap vs. country) while holding constant the actual lyrics. Collectively, the studies’ results and findings highlight the possibility that rap lyrics could inappropriately impact jurors when admitted as evidence to prove guilt.

In rap on trial cases, prosecutors treat defendant-authored rap lyrics as an admission of guilt rather than as art or entertainment. Do negative stereotypes about rap music shape jurors’ attitudes about the defendant, unfairly influencing outcomes? This Article reports on experiments where the authors found that writers of violent “rap” lyrics are perceived more negatively than writers who pen identical country and heavy metal lyrics.

This article reviews how scholars have typically challenged seemingly racialized concerns about rap music before surveying the handful of studies that empirically examine attitudes related to rap music, race, and crime.

This article reports on a study that examined how rap lyrics are evaluated when presented in a trial context and determines how individuals change their evaluations of the lyrics to support their verdict. Study participants were tasked with evaluating evidence, including rap lyrics, independently and in the context of a trial and then rendering a verdict. Results indicate that rap lyrics are viewed as interdependent with other evidence when presented at trial. Furthermore, although evaluations of lyrics did not predict determinations of guilt, verdict affected whether the lyrics were evaluated as a confession, and this effect was stronger for participants who believed the defendant was guilty. These findings highlight how introducing rap lyrics might disproportionately advantage prosecutors and contribute to our understanding of racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

This article explores “rap on trial” – prosecutors using rap lyrics as criminal evidence. The article first offers historical context, and then offer examples of cases in which rap music has been used as evidence in trials against amateur rappers, almost all of whom are young men of color, in order to illustrate the specific ways that prosecutors present the music to judges and juries, as well as to highlight the devastating effects it can have on defendants. In the final section, the article considers the elements of rap music that leave it vulnerable to judicial abuse and the artistic, racial, and legal ramifications of using this particular genre of music to put people in jail, and concludes with recommendations for further research in this area.

This article calls for “greater nuance and careful treatment” of rap-related evidence in the courtroom, which includes recognizing rap’s history, conventions, and practices generally, and acknowledging rap’s complicated and complex intersection with gangs specifically. The article advocates that “greater nuance and more careful treatment” will enable courtroom members, including judges and jurors, to make better informed evaluations regarding whether rap evidence, despite being prejudicial, is sufficiently probative and if so, what relevance it may have to the case.

This article study examines how rap lyrics were used in 160 state and federal criminal cases over a five-year period of time. Using qualitative content analysis, this study found that rap evidence was proffered in these cases in one or more of five distinct ways: (1) to prove gang affiliation or sentencing enhancement purposes; (2) as circumstantial evidence of the commission of a crime; (3) as direct evidence of having communicated a threat; (4) to prove motive, knowledge, intent, identity, or character, or (5) to establish what incited the commission of a crime. Each of these themes was examined and analyzed with respect to the function of rap evidence within each case. The analyses demonstrate that rap evidence is routinely admitted against defendants in criminal proceedings, even in cases in which the prejudicial effect of such evidence clearly outweighs its probative value.

The Rap on Trial tactic has been around since at least 1991; hundreds of courts have issued judicial opinions permitting the use of rap evidence, despite a steady stream of peer-reviewed empirical studies demonstrating that the tactic introduces a substantial risk of unfair prejudice. In this Article, the author reflects on his work on this issue, identifies important moments in the history of the tactic, explores why it has become more well-known in recent years, and what this new prominence suggests about the state of the Rap on Trial tactic. The author concludes by offering suggestions for policymakers and courts.

Are rap lyrics worthy of the same protections that other forms of creative expression enjoy, or is there something inherent to rap lyrics that renders them autobiographical, confessional, and reflective of the author’s true intentions and desires? This Article attempts to answer this question by taking the reader on a voyage through a history that is not widely known among the attorneys, judges, expert witnesses, and jurors who are frequently called upon to interpret the art form known as Hip Hop. This history reveals that Hip Hop music is the latest cultural product of the Black Oral Tradition, a tradition that utilizes linguistic devices for figurative rather than literal purposes. By placing rap lyrics in their proper historical context, this article demonstrates that such lyrics are of poor probative value when used to determine an artist’s true conduct and intentions.

This Article exposes a critical judicial failure when prosecutors use rap artistic expression as evidence: courts failing their evidentiary gatekeeping duties by allowing law enforcement officers to testify as rap lyric experts without rigorous examination of their qualifications and methodology. Instead of conducting the exacting rap-focused scrutiny required by evidence rules, judges routinely defer to an officer’s general law enforcement experience. This gatekeeping failure opens the door to juries being miseducated and unduly influenced by unqualified “experts,” and puts defendants’ liberty in jeopardy while further eroding rap’s artistic protections in criminal courts. Because rap remains a predominantly Black American art form, this judicial shortcut compounds existing racial disparities in the criminal legal system. This Article advocates that defense attorneys challenge courts to apply the same rigorous gatekeeping standards to law enforcement rap lyric experts that courts apply to medical, scientific, and other specialized expert testimony.

This paper examines the public outcry in the 1990s against violent rap songs. It was hypothesized that rap lyrics receive more negative criticism than other types of lyrics, perhaps because of their association with Black culture. Two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of musical genre and race of singer on reactions to violent song lyrics. The results support the hypothesis. When a violent lyrical passage is represented as a rap song, or associated with a Black singer, subjects find the lyrics objectionable, worry about the consequences of such lyrics, and support some form of government regulation. If the same lyrical passage is presented as country or folk music, or is associated with a White artist, reactions to the lyrics are significantly less critical on all dimensions. The findings are briefly discussed in terms of various models of racism and stereotyping.

This paper examines public outcry during the 1990s against violent rap songs. It was hypothesized that rap music receives more negative criticism than do other types of music, regardless of the actual content of the lyrics. An experiment was conducted where participants read a violent lyrical passage and were led to believe that it was either a rap song or a country song, and then responded to questions about how offensive and dangerous they thought the song was. The results support the hypothesis. When a violent lyrical passage was represented as a rap song, reactions to the lyrics were significantly more negative. Age, whether or not the participants had children, and the participants’ music tastes and buying habits were all significantly related to whether or not this biased judgment occurred. The findings are briefly discussed in terms of various models of racism and stereotyping.