Young Thug‘s lawyer, Brian Steel, has filed another memorandum of law in an attempt to get the YSL RICO case tossed out of court.
According to Law & Crime — who accessed the documents before the site-wide Fulton County Court outage — the move comes in the wake of a murder conviction in another Georgia case with ties to Hip Hop.
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On Tuesday (March 5), Morgan Cardelle Baker’s conviction in a 2019 shooting of a security guard was thrown out after Georgia’s highest court ruled that a music video for “Ghetto Angels” by NoCap in which Baker waved a gun, should not have been played for the jurors tasked with considering the 2019 killing of Tamarco Head.
Steel took note of this and filed a memorandum of law on Thursday (March 7), in which he requested that Judge Ural Glanville exclude all evidence related to the use of “rap videos, musical lyrics and the like” during the trial.
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“This Honorable Court conditionally admitted evidence of rap videos, musical lyrics and the like in the trial of this case if the prosecution lay a proper foundation for same,” Steel wrote. “Mr. Williams argued that the admission of these items without foundation that these specific lyrics, videos, words and other artistic expression violates Constitutional and Statutory provisions.”
He continued: “Without the prosecution knowing who wrote the lyrics at issue, when the lyrics were written, when the lyrics were produced, who potentially changed any lyrics, what was the intention of the lyrics, what was the mindset of the person speaking the lyrics, who authorized and promoted and orchestrated the musical videos, whether they were real guns or not, whether the musical videos were done for promotional purposes or the like, Mr. Williams again asks this Honorable Court to exclude any and all of the State’s requested evidence pursuant to the Constitutional provisions previously argued.”
Previously, Young Thug was identified as the alleged gunman in a call to 911 played during the YSL RICO trial.
During the trial on February 20, prosecutors played a recording of a 911 call made on September 11, 2013, by an unidentified woman.
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In the call, the woman first identifies Thugga as the shooter of a mutual friend, then clarifies that she was just relaying the information from an unspecified “someone else,” and wanted to get the details on the record with the police.
“They came to my house and told me that the guy who shot somebody’s name was Young Thug, whoever that’s supposed to be,” the woman said in the recording, while also making clear that the injured friend was not in immediate danger.
