Streeter: Maryland finally recognizes hip-hop lyrics are not proof of guilt

American pop culture has a super murder-y tradition that goes back even before your grandparents’ time.

Outlaw country music pioneer Marty Robbins had an album called “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs,” whose cover saw him costumed in all black with his hand on a gun. No one thought he was getting in pistol battles in cantinas.

We also never considered that in real life The Chicks fed an abusive husband poisoned black-eyed peas and dumped him in the lake, as they sang in “Goodbye Earl."

But rappers, like New Orleans native Mac Phipps, know that hip-hop artists are faced with “racism, compounded by implicit bias” in court cases that assume their lyrics are literal. Black artists are not given the same benefit of the doubt to assume they aren’t just thugs singing about their day.

Phipps knows. He spent 21 years in prison in Louisiana for manslaughter on the strength of years-old raps. Last week, he was in Maryland for the signing of a bill that would stop that from ever happening to anyone in this state.

“I hate this broad brush, that ‘If I said it on a song, it must be true,’” said the rapper, a supporter of the Protecting Artists’ Creative Expression (PACE) Act. Maryland is the third state to pass such a law, after California and Louisiana, that prohibits prosecutors from using creatives’ lyrics, poems, plays, books, choreography and any other art against them. This covers all genres, but it’s a fact that hip-hop is overwhelmingly presented as proof of guilt, even in absence of other evidence.

Gov. Wes Moore’s signing of the PACE Act is not only a solid check in the win column for freedom of speech and artistic expression, but for anti-racism. Every legal weapon available to stop that from happening is a good thing.

Erik Nielson, a professor at the University of Richmond, maintains a database that shows rap lyrics have been used in prosecutions more than 800 times, compared to just four instances of any other art form. “This gives you a sense of scale that hip-hop is an exclusive target,” he said.

Before Ivan Bates was Baltimore City state’s attorney, he was a defense attorney who saw this bias in action with a client whose words and music video were used against him in a search-and-seizure warrant in Howard County. “They said he was selling drugs in Baltimore City, but what he’d written was very artistic in nature. That struck me as very unfair,” Bates said.

Though Bates, a hip-hop fan himself, is now on the other side of the courtroom, he said the PACE Act levels the playing field. “Using an artist’s work against them is not right,” he said. “As a prosecutor, I want a system that’s fair, that sees these individuals for who they are — not where they live, the color of their skin or the music they like.”

Del. Marlon Amprey, who introduced the bill, said this act is personal to him, noting that The Lyric Theatre, Hippodrome Theatre, Everyman Theatre and Maryland Institute College of Art are all in his district. “I saw the injustices happening as it pertains to Black and brown artists. There is clear bias,” he said.

Amprey received support from Baltimore-born hip-hop executive Kevin Liles, who traveled from New York for each hearing. “I think it’s about weaponizing the judicial system to say, ‘How can we lock up more Black and brown people?” Liles said. “This wasn’t just about lyrics to me. This was about being that kid from Baltimore who picked up on hip-hop. It saved my life.”

At the same time, the system is stacked against the genre because of who largely produces and listens to it. In Chris Rock’s 2004 special “Never Scared,” he joked that you know the government hates rap because they never manage to find the murderers of hip-hop artists like Biggie and Tupac. All you had to do to get away with murder, Rock said, was plant a demo tape on a body.

The details in Phipps’ case are particularly maddening. He was accused of the murder of a teenager at a club where he was going to perform. Even though there was no physical evidence tying Phipps to the crime and someone else actually confessed, Phipps was convicted on the strength of lyrics that had been taken out of context.

“They took a piece of this sentence, and a piece of that one, and spliced them all together to make what they want to present to the jury,” he said. “I thought it was ridiculous. The lyrics they were referring to were three, four years old. There was no connection. The attorney cherry-picked.”

When there is no protection, people die. Black people die. Last month, a man named James Broadnax was executed in Texas on the strength of rap lyrics, even though his cousin confessed to the shootings Broadnax was convicted of.

Supporters of the law are clear that this is not about protecting guilty people from self-incrimination. “If you can basically corroborate the claims with actual evidence, if you wrote ‘I killed a guy on such and such a street in Baltimore,’ the law I am fighting for does not protect for self-incrimination. You should go to jail if you’re that dumb,” Phipps said.

Phipps, who decided when he left prison that he’d forgo bitterness in exchange for helping people betrayed by the system like him, just wants hip-hop artists to be given the same creative leeway as everyone else.

“One of the most popular songs in history, by Queen, starts ‘Mama just killed a man,’” he said. “You’ve got people like Johnny Cash. No one accused him of shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die.”