Jury Selection Is “Everything” In The Young Thug Rap Racketeering Trial: Experts

With a six-to-nine month estimate for the trial of Grammy-winning rapper Young Thug – accused of running a violent Atlanta street gang – the prosecution may have difficulty finding jurors leaning in their direction.

Jurors seated for such a long and life-disrupting stint are likely to be unemployed, unemployable, retired, or laborers for large corporations that will pay them during their absence, say experts.

“I’ve done lots of gang cases,” says retired Los Angeles County prosecutor David Schorr. “People don’t like gangs. Their behavior is so egregious that convictions usually follow. But that’s with trials that go for a couple weeks or even a month. With the YSL case, it’s a quite complicated RICO conspiracy trial that will go a very long time, and anyone who claims hardship is likely to be excused.”

So who’s left?

“They’re going to get people with menial jobs where the company will pay for their time off,” says Lou Shapiro, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney. “People working for the Postal Service, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, day-to-day laborers mainly doing physical work. Many will be just as happy to be sitting in a jury box rather than delivering boxes or working an assembly line for six to nine months, and they’re getting paid by the company and the court.”

And which way are they likely to lean?

“They’re more likely to align with the defense,” says Shapiro. “ They’re generally in low income jobs or unemployed, and they’ve likely been through the criminal judicial system, or have relatives who have, and many of them will feel the system is unfair and too punitive. How often do we hear: ‘My cousin got in trouble with the law, and the judicial system really treated him well?’ Not too often. Jurors who have had interactions with law enforcement or the government are going to generally have a negative experience, and that’s what they carry into the courtroom, negative experiences and narratives against the prosecution.”

That’s why prosecutors in a gang case generally like to pick white collar professionals: doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists, people that don’t tend to have so many interactions with law enforcement, and who look at law enforcement and government as protecting them.

“But they’re not likely to get white collar folks in this case,” Shapiro says. “Any of them are going to claim financial hardship, saying they can’t possibly sit for a six-to-nine month trial. The judge is not going to say, ‘Too bad, welcome to the jury, you’ll get $25 a day.’ They’re going to get excused.”

“What’s left are a lot of people who may be outliers,” says Schorr. “People who don’t like the government and don’t like the police. [The defense] will be looking for someone who had a run in with the police, got a questionable speeding ticket not too long ago, conspiracy theorists, those types. And the people who can serve this long on a jury are apt to include those types.”

The Fulton County District Attorney’s office provided no comment for this article and defense attorney Brian Steel’s law office did not respond to a request for comment.

District Attorney Fani Willis accuses Young Thug (Jeffery Williams) of co-founding a criminal gang called Young Slime Life back in 2012, around the time he released a mixtape called “I Came From Nothing.”

He came from Cleveland Avenue, one of the poorest and meanest streets in south Atlanta, but traveled to the highest altitudes of the rap and fashion worlds, often in a private jet, winning a Grammy in 2019 for co-writing the song “This is America” with Childish Gambino, and with three of his songs, including “Way 2 Sexy,” with rappers Future and Drake, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

But since last May, Williams has been cooling his heels in jail pending trial. At that time, Willis’ office indicted Williams for 56 counts of gang-related crimes under Georgia’s RICO statute, including felony charges for possession of illicit firearms and drugs that were allegedly discovered after a search warrant was executed. The rapper has been denied bail, despite testimony from supporters including Kevin Liles, head of Warner Music Group’s 300Elektra label, which distributes Williams’ wildly popular and critically acclaimed music.

But prosecutors say his label, YSL, is really a front for a criminal enterprise connected with the national Bloods gang and that they have not only contributed to an out of control crime rise in Atlanta, but also that YSL’s music and videos are used to fund and promote the Bloods.

Atlanta’s homicide rate reportedly increased for the third straight year in 2022. And Prosecutor Willis doubtless wants to avoid the fate of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, ousted last July in a recall vote after critics accused him of destroying San Francisco with a soft-on-crime approach.

The terrifying problem with Atlanta’s gang violence, according to journalist George Chidi in a report in the Intercept, is a particularly brutal streak. “The cops increasingly describe killings as targeted,” writes Chidi, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter. “A small subset of shooters want to make sure their victims aren’t just bleeding but dead. Sometimes that can look like the casually brutal murder of Anthony Frazier, a security guard at a seafood restaurant on Cleveland Avenue who took a bullet point-blank in the back of the head last month,” Chidi continues. “This is what Atlanta’s gang war looks like. It has been raging in varying forms since 2015 and went into overdrive during the pandemic, reversing more than a decade of the city’s gains against violence.”

Defense attorney Brian Steel of the Steel Law Firm and music industry figures like Liles say Williams is simply a recording artist, that YSL stands for the “Young Stoner Life” label, which has nothing to do with the “Young Slime Life” gang. Steele says Williams is completely innocent of all charges, and that he has been scapegoated by an overzealous prosecutor, police department, and politicians trying to show they’re tough on crime.

The jurors will have to decide. But what evidence will they see, and will it make a difference?

Critics of the District Attorney have claimed prosecutors don’t have much solid evidence other than rap lyrics to pin the street violence and mayhem on Williams.

“We don’t see much beyond the lyrics at the bail hearings,” says Willie “Prophet” Stiggers, a leader of the Black Music Action Coalition. “You gotta have more than the lyrics. That’s not saying that the prosecutors can’t use lyrics at all, but it can’t be the sole thing that they’re using to prosecute anyone.”

Label head Liles, the founder of the “Protect Black Art” campaign, states in a change.org petition: “The allegations heavily rely on the artists’ lyrics that prosecutors claim are ‘overt evidence of conspiracy.’ In the indictment, Fulton County prosecutors argue that lyrics like ‘I get all type of cash, I’m a general’ are a confession of criminal intent.

Some of the lyrics seem horrifying in print, but don’t always come off that way in the recording. For example, “Bad Boy,” cited by the prosecution, has Young Thug dueting with the late rapper Juice WRLD (born Jarad Anthony Higgins) in a video shot about a month before Higgins’ death from a drug overdose in December of 2019.

The song’s lyrics include the line: “I shot at his mommy, now he no longer mention me,” rapped by Williams, which the prosecutors say describes a drive-by shooting in which YSL gang members allegedly shot into a house occupied by the mother of rival rapper and alleged Blood gang member YFN Lucci (Rayshawn Lamar Bennett). Bennett, like Williams, is currently jailed without bail, facing murder charges, in another Atlanta RICO case.

“Bad Boy,” with over 190 million plays on Spotify currently, mixes an ironically mellow chill-hop beat with Young Thug’s mumbling rap style, in a child-like tone, sounding like a stoned kid rapping about something banal, like picking up sneakers at a mall, instead of discharging a firearm at someone’s mother. The two rappers’ volleys are punctuated by what sounds like machine gun sweeps. But its all muted and the rappers downplay it as “just the sound of the ‘Vette,” just a Corvette backfiring, no worries.

The song was released in January of 2021, more than a year before the murder of LaKevia Jackson in March of 2022, the mother of Williams’ first born child. The murder has been alleged as a gang-related revenge hit. The child was born when Williams was 17. He is now 31 and has six children.

Perhaps Williams could sway the jury by testifying that he regrets the “Bad Boy” lyric in light of his own tragic loss, regardless of whether it’s about anyone in particular. Or not. Williams is not an engaging speaker like rappers P Diddy or Li’l Wayne. In an interview with radio host Charlamagne Tha God, Williams comes off as shy, halting, reticent, and guileless. Not what a jury might expect from an alleged gang boss.

In any event, prosecutors will need powerful evidence beyond rap lyrics to win, especially with a jury leaning away from them.

Young Thug’s hazy and murky lyrics by themselves, as printed in the indictment, even if they were full-throated and crystal clear confessions of specific crimes with identifiable factual references – like a kind of weapon, place of a murder, or names of victims – won’t convict without corroborating evidence under Georgia law.

A criminal law doctrine called “corpus delicti” (“body of the crime” in Latin) provides that a confession of a crime outside of the courtroom, by itself, does not meet the burden of proof for a conviction (beyond a reasonable doubt) because of the possibility of false confessions. In Georgia, “the amount of evidence necessary to corroborate a confession is left entirely within the provision of the jury,” states the Trial Handbook for Georgia Lawyers (Sec. 27:7).

No jury was required at the bail hearings where Williams’ rap lyrics were used without much else to deny him bail. That’s because the standard of admissibility at a bail hearing is much lower than at the trial itself.

Opening arguments are expected in mid- or late-February and at that time attorneys are expected to tout their strongest evidence, including far more than rap lyrics. The jury may get a preview of expected testimony from Rapper Li’l Wayne and Cash Money Records chief Bryan “Birdman” Williams (no relation to Jeffery Williams), both slated to testify for the prosecution. The defense is expected to summarize testimony to come from its key witnesses, including Liles, rapper Killer Mike and Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s Global Head of Music.

But says Shapiro: “More important even than opening and closing arguments is jury selection. Honestly, it’s everything. Because if you don’t have an audience that’s willing to listen to your side, you may as well not even put on a show.”