Rap Takes Center Stage at Trial in Killing of Two Detectives
When the police arrested Ronell Wilson in 2003, a day and a half after two undercover detectives were shot in the back of the head, they found scraps of paper in his pocket with handwritten rap lyrics that bragged about a killing.
Prosecutors at Mr. Wilson’s trial at Federal District Court in Brooklyn, where he faces the death penalty, say the lyrics amount to a confession written after the shootings.
“In that rap song,” said Colleen Kavanagh, a federal prosecutor, “the defendant identifies himself by his nickname, ‘Rated R,’ and brags about shooting his victim in the back of the head.”
The scraps of paper were formally introduced as evidence yesterday, between testimony from the city’s chief medical examiner and the investigating officers. Alongside such standard evidence, rap lyrics have come up repeatedly in the first two weeks of the trial, most notably in testimony from a federal agent who recited a gang member’s violent, profanity-laden verses for the jury in a halting monotone.
Prosecutors are making similar arguments across the country this year, in courtrooms in Albany, Oroville, Calif., College Station, Tex., and Gretna, La. Set to drumbeats or scrawled in notebooks, the rhymes of minor stars, aspiring producers and rank amateurs are being accepted as evidence of criminal acts, intent and mind-set.
Defense lawyers usually argue that the lyrics are boastful fantasies, common to the point of irrelevance. Mr. Wilson’s lawyers have indicated that they plan to call a scholar named Yasser Arafat Payne, described in court documents as a rap expert, to make a similar argument.
Over more than a decade, rap has evolved as a tool for both the prosecution and defense in criminal trials.
In Austin, Tex., in 1993, lawyers for a man charged with killing a state trooper played a Tupac Shakur recording to show jurors that the defendant had been “brainwashed.” The man, Ronald Ray Howard, was executed last year.
For prosecutors, the concept of lyrics as confessional came naturally as more rap stars themselves started facing trial for shootings. Prosecutors cited Snoop Dogg’s rhyme “Murder Was the Case” in his 1996 murder trial. The rapper, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, was acquitted.
As more prosecutors used the tactic against unknown or aspiring rappers, defense lawyers first tried to contest the admissibility of their lyrics as evidence. In 2002, an appeals court in California ruled against using lyrics unconvincingly ascribed to a defendant, while the Missouri Supreme Court upheld using lyrics as evidence of state of mind. Though the issue does not appear fully resolved, defense lawyers have shifted to arguing the meaning, not the legitimacy, of rap lyrics as evidence.
Impeaching defendants with their own words is hardly a novel concept. “What’s different is the form,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, noting that many defendants appear to believe artistic license renders their lyrical confessions worthless to prosecutors.
“Whether it’s a straight confession or written in a diary under lock and key or in rap lyrics,” he said, “it’s up to the jury to decide whether it’s probative of guilt.”
In the Brooklyn case, Mr. Wilson is accused of killing Detectives James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews on March 10, 2003, while operating as a member of a drug gang on Staten Island. The detectives were working undercover, seeking to buy an assault weapon.
Rap has been a recurring sidelight of the trial.
On an audio surveillance recording, jurors heard the undercover detectives call Staten Island “Shaolin” in homage to the Wu-Tang Clan, the borough’s most famous rap export, a group whose members are somewhat obsessed with martial arts. A defense lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, briefly asked one witness to explain the reference, but never got a clear answer.
Seeking to demonstrate the existence of a criminal organization they call the Stapleton Crew, prosecutors submitted rap lyrics attributed to a member of the gang, Jamal Brown, who is serving a 12-year prison sentence for conspiracy. Handwritten, with performance instructions such as “Chorus 2x,” the lyrics are stamped “Government Exhibit 7.02(a).”
One printable passage employs nicknames to present a sort of group biography. “Rated, Ice and Poppy still locked in the cage, Keyo got killed and Jeda got draft to the team,” Mr. Brown wrote, “Stan, Gino, Jr. and Nate made the circle complete.”
Whatever their reliability as documentation, the lyrics were clearly not intended to be presented in the style they were in court. In a flat voice, Special Agent Thomas P. Kelly of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives read them to the jury, wincing slightly at the curse words and racial epithets.
When the agent was done, a defense lawyer, Kelly J. Sharkey, assured him that the cross-examination would be relatively easy.
“I’m not going to ask you to read the raps again,” she said. Special Agent Kelly’s face was not the only one to register relief.
Another defense lawyer, Mitchell Dinnerstein, sought to show that a lot of men in their early 20s, including those in the group mentioned in Mr. Brown’s lyrics, composed violent rap lyrics. That line of questioning could be used to argue that the rhymes are fantasies.
“Did you ever hear Squid do rap songs?” Mr. Dinnerstein asked a witness, an aspiring member of the group who is cooperating with the government. “How about Junior, did you ever hear him do rap songs?”
But prosecutors are seeking to focus attention on the lyrics of Mr. Wilson. The judge overseeing the case, Nicholas G. Garaufis, has ruled that the words scribbled on scratch paper found in the defendant’s pocket are acceptable evidence. The judge wrote that the lyrics describe central elements of the crime and make reference in the first person to Mr. Wilson’s street name, Rated R.
The scraps of paper entered into evidence yesterday included significant revisions, with entire lines scratched out and writing in the margins.
“Leave a 45 slug in the back of your,” appears at the top of one page, trailing off illegibly. Then the stanzas pick up again, arranged in rows.
“It’s da lightskin kid, most hated Rated,” the documents say, “Come teast Rated U Better have that vest and dat Galock.”
As the trial began last month, defense lawyers filed a letter of intent to call the expert witness.
“The rap expert is expected to testify that rap music lyrics often describe violent and sexual acts, and other antisocial behavior, that are not necessarily rooted in actual events,” the lawyers wrote. “The expert is also expected to testify that rap music lyrics are often based on imagination and fantasy, rather than on reality. We will update the information as soon as we learn more details.”
In a letter to the court Friday, prosecutors indicated that they planned to question the expert’s credibility. They mentioned several defense witnesses, including experts on forensics and mental health, but only references to the rap expert were enclosed in quotation marks. The prosecutors wrote that they had been shown “no summary of this witness’s ‘expert opinion.’ ”
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