Can your song lyrics convict you?

Correction, Aug 22, 2026. This page carried a burden-of-proof note and three questions about the Massachusetts insanity defence — material belonging to the Lindsay Clancy case, left over from when the site covered one case. It rendered here in error. The Massachusetts material was removed on 2026-08-22 and the questions below were written from this case’s own statute and model jury instruction. Nothing else on this page changed.

The test

Two separate questions are on trial here, and it helps to keep them apart. FIRST — what does 'murder-for-hire' actually require? Under 18 U.S.C. § 1958, the federal murder-for-hire law, the government must prove that someone travelled across state lines, or used the mail or a 'facility of interstate commerce' — a phone, a text message, a bank transfer, a plane ticket — with the intent that a murder be committed, and crucially that the murder was arranged 'as consideration for the receipt of, or as consideration for a promise or agreement to pay, anything of pecuniary value.' In plain English: money, or something worth money, had to be on the table. A killing motivated purely by revenge, with no payment promised, is not murder-for-hire under this statute. Because someone died, the statute's penalty is death or life imprisonment; the government has waived death. The companion charge, conspiracy, means only that two or more people agreed to do it and someone took a step toward it — a defendant does not have to fire a shot, or even be in the state. SECOND — how does a court decide whether song lyrics come in? There is no special 'rap rule' in federal court. A judge runs the ordinary evidence gauntlet: Federal Rule of Evidence 401 (is it relevant to any fact that matters?), Rule 404(b) (evidence of other acts cannot be used to argue 'he's the kind of person who does this' — that is forbidden 'propensity' or character reasoning — but it can be used to show motive, intent, plan or identity), and Rule 403, the balancing test: 'The court may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of one or more of the following: unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence.' 'Unfair prejudice' does not mean evidence that hurts the defendant — all good prosecution evidence hurts the defendant. It means evidence that invites a jury to decide on emotion or bias rather than proof. That is the exact hinge Judge Fitzgerald has been turning song by song for six months: lyrics tied to this feud and this revenge motive came in; lyrics that showed only that Banks raps about being violent or about fleeing went out as, in the judge's words, 'sheer propensity.' Note what does NOT apply: California's AB 2799, the Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act, which since January 2023 has forced California state judges to treat creative expression as minimally probative unless it was created near in time to the crime, closely resembles it, or contains non-public facts — and to weigh the risk of injecting racial bias. This is a federal courtroom. State evidence rules have no force here, so the California statute passed specifically to curb this practice does not govern the case being tried inside California's largest federal courthouse.

Who has to prove what

The government carries the entire burden, on every element of every count, beyond a reasonable doubt. Banks does not have to prove anything, does not have to testify, and his silence cannot be held against him. The burden on the evidence question is different and much lighter: the party offering a piece of evidence must persuade the judge — not the jury — that it is relevant and that its value is not substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice, a call the judge makes by a preponderance standard and one appeals courts review only for 'abuse of discretion,' meaning trial judges are rarely reversed on it. That asymmetry is why the pretrial lyrics fight mattered so much: whoever won it was very unlikely to have the ruling undone later.