Art on Trial: How Maryland’s PACE Act Challenges 40 Years of Rap Jurisprudence
Maryland just passed the strongest state-level protection for artistic expression in America — weeks after Texas executed a man whose own rap lyrics helped sentence him to death. That sequence is not
For nearly four decades, American prosecutors have operated under a quiet working assumption: that rap lyrics are autobiography, that violent bars are confessions, and that a jury hearing a Black defendant’s verses will naturally connect the music to the crime. At least 500 criminal cases have turned on that assumption. Some defendants were convicted. Some are still in prison. One was executed. Maryland’s Protecting Artists’ Creative Expression Act — the PACE Act — is the first East Coast state law to formally reject that assumption and force courts to ask a question the system has been ducking since “The Message” hit the radio in 1982: is this evidence, or is it just bias dressed in a legal robe?
The Law: What PACE Actually Does
PACE is deceptively simple in its public framing: Maryland will be the first state on the East Coast to impose consistent standards on how creative expression — rap lyrics, visual art, performance — can be used in criminal proceedings. [CBS Baltimore] It does not ban lyrics from courtrooms outright. What it does is close the loophole that allowed prosecutors to slide rap into evidence on the theory that the defendant wrote it and it sounds violent.
The law’s engine is a four-part test. Before a judge can even consider admissibility, prosecutors must demonstrate that the creative work was intended as a literal statement about the specific facts of the case, is specifically connected to those facts, and is not simply artistic expression or storytelling. [AllHipHop] In other words: no more “he rapped about guns and this is a gun case, therefore the jury should see his mixtape.” The law requires courts to ask whether the lyrics are actually evidence of this crime or just evidence that the defendant makes rap music.
Delegate Marlon Amprey, who represents Baltimore’s 40th district and helped shepherd the bill, has been unambiguous about what practice PACE is designed to stop. Lyrics are “often being used against young Black men, young Latino men, in ways in which they’re trying to say they’re more violent because of the kind of music they create,” he said. [CBS Baltimore] If a song has nothing to do with the facts of a trial, it “shouldn’t be used in court.” That’s a state legislator saying plainly what scholars and artists have argued since the early ’90s: the criminalization of rap is the criminalization of Black expressive culture.