Travis Scott and Young Thug are now part of a much bigger fight over how rap gets treated in court.

Earlier this week, Scott, Young Thug, Killer Mike, T.I., Fat Joe, N.O.R.E., and a number of artists and scholars backed a push at the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case of James Garfield Broadnax, a Texas man on death row whose rap lyrics were used during sentencing. Broadnax is scheduled to be executed on April 30, 2026.

The case goes back to 2009, when Broadnax was convicted in Texas for the killings of two Christian music producers during a robbery near Garland. After that conviction, prosecutors introduced around 40 pages of his handwritten rap lyrics while the jury was deciding whether he should be sentenced to death or life without parole. The jury reviewed those lyrics twice before sentencing him to death.

That is the part Scott’s legal team is now going after.

Scott filed his own amicus brief on March 9, arguing that Broadnax’s lyrics should not have been used that way at all. In the filing, his team says prosecutors painted Broadnax as dangerous in the future simply because he made “gangster rap,” and argued that using rap like that punishes protected artistic expression. The brief also warns that taking rap lyrics out of context “subjects the entire genre to prosecution.”

A separate brief filed the same day by Killer Mike and others makes a similar point from a different angle. That filing says the lyrics were not used to prove Broadnax committed the crime in the first place. Instead, they were brought in later, during sentencing, to make him seem more threatening and to push the jury toward death. The brief argues that this played directly into anti-rap and anti-Black bias.

That bigger argument is really what has made this case hit so hard in hip-hop. For years, rappers and advocates have said rap gets treated in court like autobiography or confession in ways other art forms do not. Violent lyrics in rock, movies, or fiction are usually understood as performance. In rap, they are much more likely to be read as literal truth. Broadnax’s supporters are now asking the Supreme Court to draw a harder line on that.

This is also not the first time this issue has come up. The debate around rap lyrics in criminal trials has been building for years, including in cases tied to Young Thug and Gunna. In response, New York and California both passed laws in 2022 limiting how prosecutors can use creative expression in court, while the proposed federal RAP Act still has not passed.

Texas, meanwhile, has argued that Broadnax’s lawyers waited too long to raise these objections and has downplayed how much the lyrics mattered in the full case. But with multiple major artists now stepping in, this is no longer just one appeal out of Texas.

If the Supreme Court takes the case, it could end up deciding much more than Broadnax’s fate. It could also decide how far the justice system gets to go when it puts rap on trial.