Vonte Skinner’s Rap Lyrics Were Ruled Inadmissible by the New Jersey Supreme Court

A courthouse in New Jersey. Photo by Flickr user Ron Coleman

Back in April, four wack lawyers stood before the New Jersey Supreme Court to argue whether Vonte Skinner’s rap lyrics should have been allowed as evidence of “motive and intent” at his murder trial. By then, Skinner had already been in jail for nearly six years. After hearing lyrics like “I’m the [person] to drive by and tear your block up / Leave you, your homey, and the neighbors shot up / Chest shots will have you spittin’ blood clots up,” and being told by prosecutors that the “subculture of violence” Skinner and his gang affiliates embodied would one day “overtake the regular culture,” jurors deemed him guilty of attempted murder.

On Monday, a unanimous Supreme Court decided the “highly prejudicial” lyrics should have been inadmissible because they “bore a high likelihood of poisoning the jury against the defendant” and ordered a retrial:

The jurors were left to speculate that defendant had done such things even though there was no evidence to suggest that his writing was anything other than fiction… In fact, we detect little to no probative value to the lyrics whatsoever. The difficulty in identifying probative value in fictional or other forms of artistic self-expression endeavors is that one cannot presume that, simply because an author has chosen to write about certain topics, he or she has acted in accordance with those views. One would not presume that Bob Marley, who wrote ‘”I Shot the Sheriff,” actually shot a sheriff, or that Edgar Allan Poe buried a man beneath his floorboards, as depicted in [one of his] short stories, simply because of their respective artistic endeavors on those subjects. Defendant’s lyrics should receive no different treatment.

Using the same Bob Marley example that I quoted Tajai from Souls of Mischeif saying in my previous article on the Skinner case, the Supreme Court recognized the unjust, outrageous stance of including Skinner’s lyrics in trial.

The court also called for “extreme caution” and demanded “strong nexus” when deciding if future lyrics should be admissible, initiating a tough precedent for admissibility of artistic evidence.

“By limiting the admissibility of artistic expressions in criminal trials to circumstances where there is a concrete connection between the expressions and the offense charged, the court has made it very difficult for prosecutors to admit creative works such as rap lyrics on the basis of vague notions of motive,” Ezra Rosenberg, the ACLU lawyer who wrote an amicus brief for the defense, said in response to the verdict.

“Without having seen this case applied, we think this is a reasonable standard,” Jason Coe, the Assistant Deputy Public Defender who represented Skinner, said.

But Erik Nielson, a professor at University of Richmond who is an expert witness in many cases involving rap lyrics, was more skeptical.

“I am more relieved by the ruling than anything else,” he said, calling the admission of lyrics “egregious and inappropriate.”

“The court repeatedly acknowledged the highly prejudicial impact that rap lyrics can have on a jury… In the judiciary today, that’s not happening with rap, and the consequences are often grave, especially for amateur rappers,” he added. "But I am not convinced the ruling will do much to slow the use of rap lyrics nationwide,” he said.

“In a genre that often contains abundant descriptions of highly graphic violence, demonstrating what appears to be a ‘direct connection’ to a crime is an easy task for prosecutors. They can simply scan lyrics for reference to a certain gun caliber, for example, and make the argument that they’ve found a connection,” he said.

Nielson has seen it done before in countless cases and isn’t confident this ruling creates a strong enough evidence test or precedent to stop the growing trend.

Just take the state’s reaction to the court's verdict: “Although music lyrics should not unfairly be used to paint defendants with a broad brush, we believe that the lyrics at issue were properly admitted because they were directly probative of defendant's motive and intent to commit the attempted murder of Lamont Peterson,” Peter Aseltine, a spokesman for the New Jersey Attorney General's Office, wrote in a statement to VICE. “The lyrics indicated defendant's role as an enforcer in a criminal street gang, and also illustrated his belief that those who violate the gang's rules must be killed,” he added, quite obviously not understanding at all that the lyrics can be a work of fiction separate entirely from Skinner’s actual life.

The state’s response is demonstrative of how most prosecutors react when dealing with rap lyrics. They’ve been used in hundreds of cases. Even a National District Attorney’s Association training manual advises prosecutors to look for lyrics, and yet the court still acted as if their admission were rare.

“I should add that I was surprised and disappointed by the Court’s assertion that ‘it is clear that other jurisdictions rarely admit artistic work against criminal defendant where those works are insufficiently tethered to the crime.’ This is simply inaccurate,” Nielson, who’s been personally involved in many of these cases, said. “Instead of calling attention to the growing misuse of rap lyrics as evidence, the NJ Supreme Court just used this important ruling to give the judiciary a pat on the back that it hardly deserves.”

I guess there’s really only so much we couldn’t expect from a group of balding white dudes, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

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