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- Title
Protecting the Right to a Meaningful Defense: Criminal Trial Storytelling.
- Authors
Wilmott, Annabelle
- Abstract
The widely accepted “Story Model” of jury decision-making acknowledges that juries, in large part, base their decisions not on logical or probabilistic reasoning but on the stories they construct at trial. Storytelling thus plays an important role in guaranteeing a criminal defendant a fair trial, especially where a defendant’s race triggers stereotypes that risk the presumption of innocence. In turn, the rules of evidence are effectively rules about how to tell one’s story. This Note reveals how the evidence rules constrain defendant storytelling in criminal trials in underexamined ways that harm Black defendants in particular. It examines how prosecutors circumvent the rule against propensity evidence by offering as evidence defendants’ rap lyrics, which activate stereotypes that harm Black defendants. Yet, because of the rules’ constraints on storytelling, defendants are often unable to meaningfully refute those stereotypes. The unrefuted rap lyrics admitted in criminal trials also stifle storytelling in a less obvious way: by chilling the speech of rappers who otherwise offer a powerful form of storytelling from the Black community. As a case study of these phenomena, this Note analyzes transcripts from a 2017 California trial where evidentiary rulings—including permitting a police officer without any background in rap or hip hop to offer expert opinion on the meaning of the defendant’s lyrics, while, at the same time, sustaining many of the prosecution’s objections when the defendant attempted to testify about the traditions of rap on which his music relied or offer additional context to refute the state’s evidence that he was in a gang—impacted the stories told and not told. Specifically, the findings demonstrate that these evidentiary decisions weakened the defendant’s ability to tell his story and counter the prejudicial evidence against him. Finally, this Note offers suggestions for strengthening criminal defendant storytelling and reducing the admission of unduly prejudicial rap lyrics and unreliable prosecution expert testimony in the courtroom.
- Subjects
FAIR trial; CRIMINAL defendants; RAP musicians; EXPERT evidence; PROSECUTION
- Publication
California Law Review, 2023, Vol 111, p927
- ISSN
0008-1221
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.15779/Z38X921K5T