James Garfield Broadnax was executed by lethal injection last night, April 30, at Texas State Penitentiary, Rolling Stone reports. Broadnax had been convicted of double murder in 2009, at the age of 19, and his case had become a cause célèbre in ongoing debates over the use of rap lyrics in court. As recently as March, a number of artists including Travis Scott, Young Thug, and Killer Mike had petitioned the Supreme Court to halt the execution. Broadnax was 37.
Broadnax and his cousin, Demarius Cummings, were arrested in 2008, after an attempted carjacking resulted in the deaths of producers Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler. Broadnax quickly confessed to the murders and even bragged about them on the local news—though he was high on PCP-laced weed at the time.
Broadnax was found guilty by a predominantly white jury, but before he could be sentenced, prosecutors entered into evidence 40 pages of handwritten rap lyrics that had been found in his car. After reviewing the documents, the jury sentenced Broadnax to the death penalty over life without parole.
Last February, Broadnax’s legal team motioned for a “Writ of Certiorari,” which would have mandated the Supreme Court to reconsider the lower court’s decision. The following month, Cummings also came forward to attest that he was the one who had killed Swan and Butler, but Broadnax had taken the fall due to his lighter criminal record. However, the Supreme Court rejected all of Broadnax’s appeals on the grounds that he never recanted his confession.
A supporting brief filed by Killer Mike, Young Thug, and a number of additional artists stated that Broadnax’s lyrics should have been considered irrelevant to to his trial as they were only introduced during sentencing. Scott filed his own separate brief, which deemed the prosecution’s case “a categorical and straightforwardly unconstitutional content-based penalty on rap music as a form of expression.”
In 2022, the New York State Senate passed a bill that limited how prosecutors can use song lyrics and other forms of “creative expression” as evidence in criminal cases. The same year, a similar bill in California became law. A federal bill on the topic, the RAP Act, was reintroduced to Congress in 2023, but has yet to pass.
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