Photo by TK Atakora
One of the lawyers representing YNW Melly in his first-degree murder case believes the Florida rapper’s lyrics could be used against him in court. In an interview with XXL, attorney Jason Roger Williams drew parallels to his former client Boosie Badazz’s 2011 murder trial, in which prosecutors cited lyrics from several of his songs to make their case against the Louisiana rapper.
“They have not used lyrics in court yet, but that seems to be the plan based on what we’ve heard so far,” Williams said. “When you look at the police behavior, when you look at the allegations that somehow rap lyrics are potential evidence or suggestive culpability or real life actions—those similarities are present in this case as well, and they were present in Boosie’s case.”
Melly is charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the October 2018 shooting deaths of his close friends, hip-hop artists YNW Sakchaser and YNW Juvy. Police claim Melly killed both men and staged the crime scene to look like a drive-by shooting. His breakout hit, “Murder On My Mind,” tells the fictional story of accidentally killing a friend.
On the track, Melly describes an unintentional shooting:
I didn’t even mean to shoot ‘em, he just caught me by surprise
I reloaded my pistol, cocked it back, and shot him twice
His body dropped down to the floor and he got teardrops in his eyes
He grabbed me by my hands and said he was afraid to die
I told ‘em it’s too late my friend, it’s time to say “Goodbye”
And he died inside my arms, blood all on my shirt
While fans immediately pointed to the violent lyrics of “Murder On My Mind” as evidence of Melly’s guilt, the breakout hit was written in 2016 and released in March 2017, more than one year before the murders he’s being charged with.
The lyrics to “Murder On My Mind” may have already played a role in Melly’s previous court cases. In a 2018 interview with The Fader, Melly said a Florida prosecutor read the lyrics out loud in court during a probation hearing.
Genius previously broke down everything you need to know about the song:
Williams also shared why he thinks prosecutors continue to use rap lyrics as evidence in court. “The thing that some law enforcement folks just haven’t realized yet is that rap lyrics are just lyrics, just like rock song lyrics are just lyrics, just like Al Pacino’s in his script in Scarface are just words on a page!” he explained. “However, when the person who is rapping is young and African-American, they somehow want to make a leap that these things are not just creative.”
In 2016, Genius spoke to professor Erik Nielson about how courts are using rap lyrics to imprison people of color. At the time, he believed lyrics had been used in hundreds—if not thousands—of cases, with the race of the defendant often playing a role:
Race is without question involved in this. I think rap is often a proxy for a young black male. When we talk about the demonized and villainized rappers, it’s coded because for us rap music is an accurate representation of black life. So when we talk about rap, we’re really just finding another way to talk about black and Latino men.
The debate over using rap lyrics in court has become even more heated recently. In February 2019, the Brooklyn Appeals Court ruled rap lyrics can be used as evidence in court while rejecting the appeal of rapper and gang leader Ra Diggs, who argued that his lyrics and musical persona shouldn’t have been brought into the case.
A recent brief filed to the US Supreme Court could hold even greater significance for the legal issue. As reported by The New York Times last month, rappers including Killer Mike, Chance the Rapper, Styles P, 21 Savage, and Meek Mill offered justices “a primer on rap music and hip-hop” while urging the Supreme Court to hear a First Amendment challenge by a Pittsburgh man named Jamal Knox who raps under the name Mayhem Mal.
Read the full interview at XXL, and catch up on all the lyrics to YNW’s “Murder On My Mind” on Genius now.
