James Broadnax: When A Poem Becomes A Death Warrant

There’s a man in Texas named James Broadnax who has been sitting in prison for almost half of his life, and on April 30, 2026, the state plans to kill him.

Broadnax is 37. He’s been tethered to death row since he was 20. When a nearly all-white Dallas County jury decided this young Black man was too dangerous to live, the facts of the crime didn’t seem to matter. Instead, these jurors peered into a spiral notebook full of rap lyrics he’d scribbled as a teenager and chose his fate.

Forty pages of handwritten rhymes—the aspirations of a teenager mimicking the stories he’d heard in his headphones—became the catalyst for a death sentence. Prosecutors weaponized Boradnax’s lyrics during sentencing, framing him as a “new breed” and a “stone-cold psychopathic killer.” According to The Marshall Project, the jury asked for those notebooks twice during deliberations. They returned with a death sentence that same day– a clear example of what a state-sponsored fear of Black imagination looks like in real time.

In 2008, Broadnax was convicted of the murders of Matthew Butler and Stephen Swan, two music producers shot during a robbery in Garland that netted exactly two dollars. Two. Dollars. He and his cousin, Demarius Cummings—both 19 and high on PCP—were arrested shortly after. While still chemically compromised, Broadnax gave a jailhouse television interview claiming he’d pulled the trigger. That “confession,” extracted while his mind was fragmented, became the spine of the state’s case. This “media interview” was conducted just hours after his arrest, before he had been appointed legal counsel or had the chance to sober up.

Demarius Cummings got life. James Broadnax got death.

Seventeen years later, the truth is finally coming to light. On March 19, 2026, Cummings signed a sworn declaration from his prison cell. He admitted he was the sole shooter. He confessed he pressured a drug-impaired James to take the fall because James had a clean record. His words were plain: “I want to clear my conscience and do not want James to be executed for shooting two people when I was the one who committed those acts.”

Cummings is trying to save his cousin’s life. We should be too.

The DNA evidence supports him, by the way. At trial, the prosecution’s own expert testified that Broadnax’s DNA was nowhere on the trigger or grip of the murder weapon. Cummings’ DNA, however, was found on the grip and in the pocket of one of the victims.

This is the evidence the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals received on April 8. They reviewed it and promptly dismissed it. Not because the confession lacked merit, but because of procedural bars. The court chose “finality” over the reality of a confession. The rules allowed them to look away, so they did.

Judge Gina G. Parker’s opinion was chillingly direct. She wrote that because James never formally recanted his original, PCP-induced “media confessions,” his current claim that he lied at age 19 must fail. She essentially argued that a teenager’s intoxicated ramblings to a news camera hold more weight than a sober, sworn affidavit from the actual shooter 17 years later.

The court even went a step further, arguing that even if they believed Cummings was the shooter, James would still be “guilty at least as a party.” They claimed a “rational jury” could find he anticipated a life would be taken when he agreed to the robbery. This is a staggering logic—the state prosecuted him specifically as the triggerman to get the death penalty, but now that he’s proven not to be, they argue it doesn’t matter.

Watching this machine grind forward feels hauntingly and frustratingly familiar. One of the first cases I ever organized around was that of Shaka Sankofa, who we knew previously as Gary Graham. Like Broadnax, Sankofa was a Black teenager—just 17—when he was sent to Texas’ death row based on the testimony of a single witness who claimed she saw him through a windshield from 30 feet away. Despite six other witnesses who placed him elsewhere, and a global outcry for his innocence that reached from the streets of Houston to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Texas executed him in 2000.

Sankofa’s death was a catalyst for me. Witnessing the state’s clinical commitment to executing a man despite such staggering doubt was the beginning of my journey as an abolitionist. Texas’ death penalty policies have always been aimed at Black people with a vicious, predatory precision. While Black people make up only about 13% of the Texas population, they represent over 47% of its death row inmates. In Harris County alone, data shows that between 2004 and 2018, the District Attorney’s office sought the death penalty in 21 cases, obtaining sentences exclusively against people of color. It became clear then when we were rallying around Shaka, and it’s even clearer now: we cannot reform a system that was built on Black labor and Black death. The criminal legal system must be transformed in ways reforms simply won’t produce. 

Texas continues to operate under its “future dangerousness” standard. It’s a license for racial imagination to do its most horrific work. The Death Penalty Information Center notes that these predictions are unreliable. Yet we stay trapped in this loop, asking white juries to predict Black futures like they’re reading a crystal ball shaped entirely by racial bias.

In James’ case, the jury room was built with intention and purpose. According to U.S. Supreme Court filings, prosecutors used seven strikes to remove Black prospective jurors from Broadnax’s trial. Documents later surfaced showing prosecutors tracked Black jurors on a spreadsheet where their names were bolded. Professor Sheri Lynn Johnson put it clearly to the Houston Defender: “If you want to make a racist argument about a defendant based on their rap lyrics, then you want a white jury to listen to it.” 

Now, the music industry is pushing back. Travis Scott, Young Thug, and T.I., among others, have filed amicus briefs at the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that weaponizing lyrics is a First Amendment violation. As Travis Scott’s brief argues, “Such an argument functionally operates as a categorical and straightforwardly unconstitutional content-based penalty on rap music as a form of expression.” Counsel Ellyde R. Thompson added: “A death sentence should never be based in any part on constitutionally protected artistic expression.”

There’s something those legal briefs won’t say that those of us from Black creative traditions know in our bones. Rap has never just been music to the state. It’s always been a method of surveillance. The Guardian has reported on how often these metaphors are turned into motives by prosecutors. A white country artist can sing about whiskey-soaked revenge, and it’s called storytelling. A Black teenager writes a few tales about violence in a notebook, and a prosecutor calls it a prophecy.

Professor Erik Nielson has found over 800 cases where rap lyrics were used as evidence—almost exclusively against Black defendants. We have to recognize this as the violent machine it is. It’s a vicious vulture circling Black creativity, waiting to turn a metaphor into a motive for whatever the legal system wishes to claim as facts.

With only days left before James Broaddnax’s scheduled execution, two petitions are pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. A clemency petition also sits with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. I think about the young people in our communities who write their thoughts into verses, having no idea their imagination could one day become their indictment.

Abolition is about the revolutionary act of choosing life and care over state-sanctioned violence. There’s no appeal after April 30. There will be no justice for James Broadnax after he enters that execution chamber. We have to lean into solidarity because the state has already shown us it has no intention of doing what is clearly morally right.

I’m also asking you to lean into your own curiosity. What does it say about a state that treats poetry as a death warrant, but treats a confession as an inconvenience?

We cannot wait for courts to decide Black lives are worth saving. They’ve already told us they won’t.

Go to tcadp.org/save-james-broadnax. Sign. Call. Fight for James Broadnax while he’s still alive. Another world is possible if we continue to reach for it. I believe that, and I hope you do too.

Josie Pickens is an educator, writer, cultural critic, and abolitionist strategist and organizer. She is the director of upEND Movement, a national movement dedicated to abolishing the family policing system.

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