The state’s highest court has overturned the murder conviction of a man sentenced to serve life in prison, ruling that a rap video played at his trial unfairly prejudiced the Middle Georgia jury deciding the case.
Morgan Baker, an Alabama man convicted in the fatal 2019 shooting of a security guard outside a Warner Robins nightclub, had his conviction reversed this week in a 7-2 ruling.
A majority of Georgia Supreme Court justices determined that the judge in Baker’s trial abused her discretion by allowing prosecutors to show a 33-second clip from a music video in which he waved a pistol.
“The rap music video was highly prejudicial,” Justice Sarah Hawkins Warren wrote for the court. “It allowed the State to introduce impermissible propensity evidence by portraying Baker as a threatening gunman, and the prosecutor severely exacerbated the video’s prejudicial impact by emphasizing that it showed Baker’s predisposition to gun violence.”
Baker’s appearance in the video was relatively brief, but the prosecutor “made it a focal point of the trial” by playing it three times and referencing it again in her closing arguments, Warren said.
Houston County District Attorney William Kendall said he plans to retry Baker without the rap video.
“Obviously we’re going to retry the case without that particular piece of evidence,” Kendall said. “The trial court will know now that that evidence can’t come in, and we’ll proceed forward.”
Kendall said that Baker would be taken from prison to the Houston County jail pending the retrial and that the DA’s office would oppose any motion for bond.
The decision comes as lawyers in the “Young Slime Life” trial in Fulton County continue to debate whether Young Thug’s rap lyrics should be heard by jurors.
The probative-versus-prejudicial value of introducing rap music as evidence in criminal cases has been a central theme in the ongoing gang and racketeering trial against Atlanta rapper Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, and five others.
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
The judge in the YSL case is allowing certain sets of rap lyrics to be admitted if prosecutors can lay the basis for how those verses pertain to real-world crimes allegedly committed by the defendants or their associates. Two music videos have been played in court so far, but the jury has only seen one.
Other photos and videos introduced as evidence in the YSL trial have shown some of the defendants flashing guns or throwing up what prosecutors say are gang signs along Cleveland Avenue in south Atlanta.
Defense attorney Don Samuel, who represented Baker in his appeal, called the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision “an important ruling signaling the appellate court’s intolerance of using rap music and rap videos to unfairly prejudice the jury.”
“Unless the rap video is relevant to a disputed issue in the case, there is no reason to portray the defendant as a dangerous person based on (their) participation in a ‘theatrical’ video,” Samuel said Wednesday.
Baker was convicted of murder and other charges in the July 6, 2019, shooting of Tamarco Head, a 38-year-old security guard who was killed after a concert at Club Boss.
Baker had been working as a road manager for his close friend Kobe Crawford, a rap artist who performs under the name “NoCap,” records show. Witnesses testified that Baker and another man fought with security guards before Head was shot.
Baker testified that he was at the club that night, but denied shooting anyone. The suspected second shooter was never identified.
The state Supreme Court said the evidence presented against Baker at trial was “not especially compelling,” and that it’s possible the introduction of the music video contributed to the guilty verdict.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Shawn Ellen LaGrua said the trial judge did not abuse her discretion by admitting the video as evidence, and that even if there was an error, it likely didn’t contribute to Baker’s conviction.
LaGrua disagreed with the majority opinion that the rap video had been a “focal point” of the murder trial and said that “substantial evidence of Baker’s guilt was presented to the jury.”
Chief Justice Michael Boggs agreed with the dissent.
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