Hidden Brain - A Rap on Trial

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

In the past few weeks, the nation has been gripped by protests against police brutality toward black and brown Americans. The enormous number of demonstrators may be new, but the biases they're protesting are not. In 2017, we looked at research on an alleged form of bias in the justice system. This week, we revisit that story, and explore how public perceptions of rap music may have played a role in the prosecution of a man named Olutosin Oduwole.

Hey there, Shankar here. The Hidden Brain team has been transfixed by the nationwide protests in recent weeks. The enormous number of demonstrators may be new, but the biases they're protesting are not. In 2017, we produced an episode on a little-known form of racial bias. We decided to return to that episode now as many people are pushing for reforms in the criminal justice system. Please note that the episode includes the sounds of shootings from a college campus, as well as music with violent and explicit language. Here's the episode. On a chilly April morning in 2007, a nightmare unfolded on a college campus in Virginia,

a 23-year-old student acting alone opened fire in a dormitory. He shot and killed two students. Then he walked across campus and began killing people in an engineering building. The sound of gunfire was caught on a student's cell phone. We weren't sure what it was. It was gunshots, but for a while we thought it would have been construction. We heard this horrible scream and laughter. Tina Harrison was a student in the building. So we were sitting in the classroom and basically panic broke out. All we could hear was people

screaming, laughter and more screaming. And I counted 24 gunshots within a minute and I lost track after that. I just started praying. By the time the assault ended, 32 people were dead. The gunmen took his own life. The shooting at Virginia Tech was quickly seared into our minds as one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history. Unfortunately, it's been followed by many other school shootings, including the

killing of 17 students in Parkland, Florida. In all these cases, the news media has struggled to convey the sheer scale of the massacre. There is terror and then sorrow today at the campus of Virginia Tech. There's an act of evil on a scale that we've never seen in this country before. 24 hours after the news began to break, Blacksburg, Virginia, is still in shock from its wounds, and so is much of the time. But even as the country mourned, people began to ask why campus officials

hadn't been more proactive. Why hadn't they spotted the warning signs? Why hadn't they locked down the school after the first shooting of the dorm? At a press conference, campus police tried to explain. We had information from witnesses and the evidence at the scene that

led us to believe the shooter was no longer in the building and more likely off campus. Reporters grilled officials who at times seemed lost for words. Can you outline your lockdown policy for the university? Are you saying that do we have a policy to walk down the campus? Yeah, I'm like, when? Under what circumstances do it?

What's your time right now? It's not in my communications plan. Eventually, the state of Virginia and the university paid victims' families more than $11 million to settle lawsuits. Across the nation, universities cramble to improve their security protocols. Many added expensive upgrades to emergency alert systems and hired new police officers to stay on top of possible danger. Awareness to cold on college campuses.

A subtle fear was in the air, a low grade buzz of anxiety. People weren't taking chances. At schools like Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, small things that were out of place led to intense scrutiny. His car was discovered, parked in a very conspicuous, very unusual, no parking area at the university here in Edwardsville.

And they found, you know, visible in the car, a note. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore a complicated case that unfolded in the months after the Virginia Tech shooting. It was so complicated that even today, years later, people still disagree about what really happened. At the heart of the case was this question, how can we know, really know, What's happening inside another person's head? Perception, reality and judgment. This week on Hidden Brain. Three months after the Virginia Tech Massacre, an Illinois gun dealer picked up the phone and called a federal bureau of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. He told an agent that he was worried about a client who was trying to put his guns.

It was the first time he'd ever made a report to the ATF and I think about 10 years of being a gun seller, a gun dealer. Tom Gibbons is the Madison County Illinois State's attorney. Tom says the man who'd contacted the Gundiler was agitated and adamant. He said he needed the guns quickly. And what he was purchasing was unusual. He was buying three low-cost, exact same models of a gun. A semi-automatic handgun, a 380 caliber. The Gundiler explained that the man, whose name was Oletosun Odoale, had purchased the

gun's wholesale on the internet and needed him, a licensed transfer agent to complete the transaction. Oletosun's background check was clean, but the Gundiler felt something wasn't right. The ATF suspected Oletosun might possibly be its tropurgisir, someone buying guns for someone else. But Tom Gibbons says police also considered more sinister motives. Having three identical weapons, if a person is going to do something harmful or commit a mass casualty event, having three identical firearms has the advantage of being able to

use the identical ammunition, to use the exact same magazines with that ammunition no matter which of the guns you're using, and of course buying low-cost multiple weapons allows you to have multiple weapons available at a single time. The ATF quickly learned that Oluhtosin was a student at Southern Illinois University. The ATF contacted the local police department and they began to look into it. According to documents later filed in court, the ATF agent also called campus police detective, Rick Weisenborn. The ATF gave the detective a heads up that Oletosan had ordered weapons over the internet. Rick Weisenborn wrote a memo to his colleague that advised them to use caution

if they encountered the young man. Two days later, a police officer on a routine campus patrol came across an unattended car. He alerted Rick Weisenborn, who went to investigate. Police traced the license plate to Oletosun, Odehwale. His car was discovered, parked in a very conspicuous, a very unusual, no-parking area at the university here in Edwardsville. Police monitored the vehicle to see if anyone approached it. For two days, Rick Weissenborn drove past the car himself.

No one showed up. The detective notified his supervisor. Campus police were authorized to tow a vehicle that had been left unattended for more than 24 hours. So when his car was being towed, it's the police department policy that the car is inventoryed. They take an inventory of the contents and they found, you know, visible in the car a note. It was protruding from underneath the center console.

It had writing on both sides, on one side what's seen like rap lyrics. Turn the page over and there were more lyrics. Tom says they read like this. And you may have to believe some of this out. I lead she a follower. I'm single and not with her, but she got a throat deeper than a sword's follower. For the down on the page was more writing. Tom says these were not lyrics. Send two dollars to, and then it's a PayPal account.

If the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days, then a murderous rampage similar to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university, and then in all capital letters, this is not a joke. Police didn't take it as one. Detective Rick Weisenborn took photos of the vehicle. While snapping pictures of the backseat, he noticed release straps and pulled them to lower the seat backs. He found a water clothing. There was a long sleeve shirt, a short sleeve shirt, and a knit cap

with a ski mask. The detective seized all of it. Officers also found six rounds of 25 caliber ammunition in the car. They felt they needed to act fast. It was pretty early in the morning, I remember, and I just got out of the shower. they needed to act fast. This is Thomas Phillips, the third. He was Oletozen Odeoale's roommate that summer. He remembers a loud pounding on the door. And there was about eight police officers standing there.

Thomas was asked to step out of the room. Police told Oletozen he was under arrest. Oletozen was wearing basketball shorts and a tank top. He didn't have shoes on. They cuffed him, they had his hands behind his back, and he didn't look my way when he came out, but I don't also think that he saw where I was sitting because I was sitting off to the side of the stairs, but they took him out the long way towards the back where they had a car waiting for him. A search of the dorm room uncovered a camcorder, videocassettes, and a Dell laptop computer. Tom Gibbon says there was also something else, a Jennings 25 caliber pistol.

Reloaded firearm. The gun belonged to Oletosan. So let's review. A young man attempts to purchase multiple guns over the internet. His describe is agitated and anxious by a gun dealer involved in the transaction. The ATF launches an investigation. The young man's car is found, apparently abandoned on a campus side road. Inside it is a piece of paper with a threat on it, alluding to ransom and a possible massacre

on a university campus. When the young man is arrested, a loaded gun is discovered in his dorm room. State's attorney Tom Gibbon says police felt they had prevented a serious crime. So connecting the dots, it became apparent that in fact he was planning. He was, if not planning an actual mass casualty event,

he was planning to be able to credibly threaten that. And he was taking steps, actual steps towards making a terrorist threat. It wasn't long before the news media got a hold of the story. Coming just after the Virginia Tech shooting, the story generated wall-to-wall coverage. Thomas Phillips. For, I'd say about a week's solid, news coverage had its face on CNN, MSNBC, like, you know,

pretty much any news station you could turn to, uh, that had headline news. And he was either the first or second subject of it. That's all we saw in the news of him what's pretty much. He's a terrorist, he planned this entire attack, he left a threatening note in his car, there was ammunition, he was purchasing guns to either fund this attack or carry the attack out. They showed a table of guns that he never got, but that he wanted to actually buy at some point. It turned out Oletosin had actually ordered four guns off the internet, three of them low caliber guns identical to one another, and the other was a 45 caliber Mach 10 semi-automatic.

State's Attorney Tom Gibbons. That is a high capacity, certainly a high caliber. It's a scary, certainly a scary looking gun. As reporters pressed for answers, the investigation grew. Friends were contacted, evidence collected. Then police discovered something important. During the investigation, there were computers seized. And something that was located on his girlfriend's computer

was a file that he had created in a program called Movie Maker. And what he had made was a video with this language that was found in the note. It was language that read, do you remember the chaos at Virginia Tech? Well, guess what? It's going to happen again in June 2007 unless the viewers of this collectively deposit

a total of $200,000 in the following PayPal account. Or else, the number of students killed in Virginia Tech will be topped during the summer school semester at a target university. This is not a joke. Tom Gibbons told me that the language was found in a file that had been deleted. If the video was deleted, how did you know what was in it? Well because nothing is ever really completely deleted off a computer. Our forensic examiners were able to go in, take an image of the hard drive after securing

it and extract and do an analysis of all the data that remains on a hard drive. On July 24, 2007, Oletos and Odehuale was formally charged with storing a weapon in campus housing and a far more serious crime attempting to make a terrorist threat. The case that was made was effectively that he had constructed this threat. He was planning to use this threat either to act upon it. It was either that or he was trying to extort money. It was a strange charge and attempt to make a threat. But since prosecutors couldn't prove that threat had actually been communicated to anyone, that was the best they could do. I would say that there was only one step missing that we couldn't prove, and that was the actual public posting of the threat. That was the only last piece of evidence that we didn't have that would have made it a

completed terrorist threat. But Tom felt they had plenty of proof showing planning, preparation, and effort to purchase firearms. It's like a conspiracy type of case. It's not exactly conspiracy, but in the same vein, a person is taking actual substantial steps toward the commission of the offense. And by doing that, they are in effect

attempting to commit it. I asked Tom if this was like someone who does some research on how to hire a hitman, but doesn't act on it. Well, I would like to add more to the person who takes the gun, drives to the intended victims house, and for whatever reason, doesn't get out of the car. But they've taken an actual substantial step toward the act, toward the murder. It's more than just thinking about it. It's more than just a little bit

of research. There was a substantial amount of work that went into this. So I like the analogy that you have just now, and I'm curious sort of from a legal perspective, what you do with that, because let's say someone does buy a gun and does drive to someone's house and doesn't get out of their car and drives off. And let's say the authorities have some way of knowing about all of this happening. Can you charge that person with a crime? In the murder context, no. In the threatening context, you can,

because they're taking actual steps, they're creating things, they're creating the threat. In Tom Gibbons' mind, a catastrophe had been averted. But had it? To find out, I went to meet the man who police described as a dangerous, would-be terrorist. Stay with us. Today, the story of a young man accused of an attempted terrorist attack, that young man is Oletosan Oduwale. It's a Nigerian name, but it was given to a boy who was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. You know, as a kid, me and my brothers and our friends in the neighborhood used to play

in our backyard, we used to go out into the woods and play hide and seek and cops and robbers and all that good stuff and we used to ride our bikes all throughout the neighborhood. All the Tosan's parents left Nigeria and emigrated to the United States when they were young. Tosan, as he was called, was raised with his five brothers in a six bedroom house in St. Louis. He was surrounded by music, lots and lots of music. I fell in love with music probably around seven or eight years old. You know, I grew up listening to a lot of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, a lot of West Coast music. I'm a little bit of like biggy and nods, but majority West Coast music. What Tosin is talking about here is 90 style gangster rap straight out of L.A.

Young men like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were writing their talent into stardom. Gangsta rap evolved from hip-hop. It's long been controversial because it emphasizes the gangster lifestyle and it times promotes violence, misogyny, drugs and murder. But it's popular and commercially very lucrative. For a kid like Tosun, he was magnetic. He was all in. In eighth grade, specifically, it was in eighth grade. Me and a lot of my friends were used to start like wrapping at the lunch table with freestyle and some I would do the beat on the table and we would just go in a circle with just freestyle,

you know, and it'd be like seven or eight of us. And we would do this every single day, literally every single day. And it was just a lot of, you know, profanity, a lot of just, okay, we can finally say what you want to say and give me an example. Okay, so UGK has a song called Take It Off, which was really, really big around like 95 to 98. And so that was a really, really big song.

How did you go? You're putting me on the spot. It was Take It Off Trick, Ben, over, let me see it. If you're looking for a trailside, nigga, let me be it. Got the V-12 Bins. Parked outside. Ain't another room left with the girls in my ride. Something like that.

You love this one, you were 12? Oh yeah, definitely. And so this has stayed with you for a long time. Oh, of course, that's one of my most favorite, favorite groups of one house a kid. Tosun says the swearing and tough talk. That wasn't really the point. The music itself was what moved him. Like the rhythm, the bass, the drums, the high hats, it was just like a feel. I think what really makes people gravitate towards music and how it makes them feel.

And so hip-hop itself, even if you're not in this way from the culture, hip-hop makes you feel a certain way. It makes you feel strong, braggadocious, free, it makes you feel creative. Toaston had a dream that maybe someday he could make a name for himself as a rap star. But when he was 14, his father sent him abroad for school, first to England and then to Nigeria. Now that might not seem the best move for an aspiring rap artist, but Tosun says his Nigerian boarding school was full of kids like him. So I was surrounded around a lot of people from New Jersey, New York, Atlanta, California,

and London, and a lot of them made music. And so a lot of what we used to do in Nigeria when we were in the dorms is that we would write rap music. And I think it was in Nigeria where I really got, I guess, like creative and better and because we were able to just really lock in. In America, I was only with my friends at school seven hours a day. In Nigeria, I'm with the 24 hours a day for three months.

You know, and so it was, yeah, it was, it was where I, I guess, I fell in love with it more. It was when I was in Africa. It was in Nigeria that Tosun made his public debut as a rapper. In church, he went to a Christian school and each Sunday, the entire school went to church. It was a huge church. Sometimes they would allow students from the church to either sing songs on stage or do what a performance is. We decided to do a rap.

A Christian rap. In front of the entire congregation, 2,500 people. When Toaston tells the story, you can hear his happiness just remembering that moment. I run on stage with the mic and everybody's like, and everybody's like praising you and And everybody's like praising you. And then I started rapping.

Nobody heard what I said, but they were going crazy. And it was like, this is a church. I really fed my ego like, oh man, people love me. The people love me, you know, like whatever, it's just church. But that was really really, I guess, a confidence builder, as far as I go, okay, you can take your wraps away from just your circle of friends and actually, like, say them to the public.

When Tosin was in his last year of high school in Nigeria, he applied to go to college in the United States. He had only one school in mind, southern Illinois University. It appealed to him because it was close to St. Louis, close to his family, his friends, his home. He was accepted. In the fall of 2005, he started his freshman year. Tosin describes it as a pretty typical introduction to college life, classes, parties, students always moving together in huge groups. In the spring, Tosin decided to join a fraternity. He chose and was accepted by Ayoda Phi Theta, an historically African-American frat.

Thomas Phillips met Tosin through the fraternity. He remembers his first glimpse of him because Tosin stood out. He was a little bitty kid wearing a gigantic hoodie and the biggest headphones. Vintage headphones. So do you know, like back in like the 80s when they first had like the home stereo headphones

that were like the big gigantic cushion pairs with the metal braces on the sides? Like once you would necessarily wear out in public, you might listen to like these headphones in the comfort of your own home. But something about those headphones and him being as small as he was then kind of stuck out to me. So as it turned out, he was really big in the music, especially rap music. And that was the best pair of headphones

he could find at the time. They gave him the best sound quality. So. The two became good friends. Thomas Sess Tosin was big-hearted. He looked out for people. He often asked fraternity brothers to help him check up on the homeless in the area. He organized campus events, including a speech by former black panther Bobby Seal. And he drew people together with his music. It was music that made him such a good fit for the fraternity. At the time, most of us in the fraternity at least had some kind of musical talent, like if you didn't play an instrument, you sung, if you couldn't sing, you rap. If you couldn't do any of the three, which I can't, then you were either a producer or

a mixer. Tosin, of course, rapped. Thomas produced. They started talking about making it big. As Thomas describes those days to me, he says it's important to understand one thing about Toeson. His music meant everything to him, but it wasn't him. So one of the things that I did notice was that as much as Toeson, his personality, his actual personality came through in his actions. His music was entirely different.

Tosin did relish songs with violent and misogynistic lyrics, but that didn't mean that he was a violent or misogynistic person. One of his favorite groups at the time was P6 Mafia. Who run? Who run? Who run? Who run? I'm not sure if you're familiar with them or not, but a lot of their music at the time was pretty much the version of Rock n' Roll was like six and drugs kind of deal. Eventually Thomas and Tosin decided to move in together. They found a ratty two bedroom apartment not far from campus. Thomas says it was perfect. Meaning like if you want to wrap about you know how hard your life is and how

you know there's a lot of crime in your area and you want to wrap about what's real like this is the place that you can actually do it and it feels authentic because you're not actually recording this from You know, you know a nice Apartment in St. Louis some place. You know recording this in a hotel or in a penthouse or a nice recording studio We're in the basement. They're roaches everywhere and we record this in the closet You know what because our studio was in the living room There was a closet in the living room, which was for coats.

Like, no one you have guests come, you take their coats, you put them in the closet. We turned that closet into a studio booth. So our microphone was in there, we put foam all over the walls to kind of soundproof it, and that was the studio booth. The apartment became a rap salon,

or, as Tosin puts it, an artist's stand. And so that was how it was. It was pieces of paper and notebooks everywhere in the living room. A couch, a TV, artist then. And so that was how it was. It was pieces of paper and notebooks everywhere in the living room, a couch, a TV, a computer, studio equipment, microphone, keyboard, and that was our artist space. They were experimenting, writing, rewriting, trying to compose songs that worked. They played a couple of gigs on campus. Sometimes they handed out free CDs to get their name out. But

money was always tight, and they needed better equipment. Tosin views himself as an entrepreneur. He proudly points out that he came from a family of self-starters. So he says he started looking for opportunities to make some extra cash. He landed on an idea, one that in retrospect might not have been the best. It involved the internet and guns. And so I was thinking, okay, you know, maybe this could be a beginner business where I could buy these guns very cheap from the manufacturers online, have them shipped to a local dealer, and then resell them for retail price and make a little bit of money and we could use

this money and buy all the equipment, studio equipment that we could dream of because that was one thing that was kind of harming us our first six or seven months the equipment that we were recording music with was very bad it was just you know the final songs to be a lot of static and it would be just new we needed better equipment what toson was thinking of is called drop shipping it's used all the time in online sales. When you buy a product online from a retailer,

that product isn't necessarily sitting in the retailer's warehouse. Sometimes the retailer has to order it from a wholesaler. You've paid for a product the retailer doesn't physically possess. Tosin thought he could adapt this model to the online gun market. Buy Guns wholesale and then mark up the price. The basic business idea was by low sell high period. Tosin advertised Guns for sale online. Once people bought them, he ordered the guns from the wholesaler.

But with Guns sales, there's a catch. Guns bought wholesale must go through a licensed gun dealer before they can pass on to a buyer. That didn't worry Tosin, he wasn't doing anything illegal. He contacted a local gun dealer and asked him to put through the transaction. And so that was what I was doing, you know, I never took possession of those guns, I never intended to, I never did. Tosin agrees that he called the gun dealer repeatedly to ask about the weapons. But that's because he says he had already accepted money from buyers and needed to complete the transaction.

So, to recap, we have a young man with big dreams. He's got a budding career as a rapper, an active social life, and a commitment to community service. He's buying guns, but only he says, to sell them and make a little extra cash for music equipment. This is not the picture of a would-be terrorist, but that brings us to that piece of paper that police found in Tosin's car, as State's Attorney Tom Gibbons put it. They found, you know, visible in the car a note. It had music lyrics on one side, but a threat on the other.

It had music lyrics on one side, but a threat on the other. Send $2 to a PayPal account. If the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days, then a murderous rampage similar to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university. And then in all capital letters this is not a joke. It would be hard to explain a way a note like this, demanding ransom threatening a campus massacre.

But Tosun says the problem lies in one word. Note. What the police found, he insists, was not a note. It was scribbled ideas for a rap song. This is how Tosun says it all unfolded. It began as an idea one night in the artist then Tosun had just finished watching the TV show Law and Order The episode was about some bloggers who live streamed their home on social media So it's me Willow again a lot of you commented on the fight that holds it and I had me as face video home on social media.

And so the way the episode started off, while they were live streaming, just hanging out, masked men kicking the door, kiddin' at the girl, beat her up her boyfriend. And then later, they get back on her online page and start a rancid. Tosin was fascinated by the episode. He loved the way it played with viewers. All the way through, it kept people guessing. Were they watching an actual kidnapping take place online? Were they watching performance art?

Tosun thought the premise might make a cool, spoken introduction to a rap song. And so that was where the idea I was trying to figure out something, I tried to figure out something that would be real to what's actually in life. Like there is PayPal and there is YouTube and there is et cetera there is etc etc etc. And so it was kind of like a copy of that but it's something that wasn't as fake as

that. Something that was actually real. Sometimes rap songs start this way with introductions that set a scene with lyrics that don't rhyme. That, says Stoßen's friend Thomas, is what they were playing with. You heard the introduction to Nas's, it was written. I haven't, how does it go? It starts off with two slaves in the field, and this is said back in, you know, the slavery

days. So, and American history. So what happens is that the two slaves hear the overseer coming, and they decide to stage in a revolt right at that point. And you hear the slaves beating the master down, and then you hear the slaves being dragged away once the revolt's pretty much quill at that point. So it's the introduction that draws you in and you hear this violent introduction

and then the lead song comes on. Tosin wondered whether the demand for a ransom and the threat of a campershooting could make for a good intro. The friends played with the idea and tried out a few things. They wrote some lyrics on a piece of paper. They even made a lyric video where the words of a song scroll on the screen. Toaston Felt it didn't work.

But some of the lines he wrote on the other side of the paper did eventually become a song. It was called Pop It Mommy Pop It. It's like a club song. It's about like girls dancing in a club called Pop It Mommy Pop It. It's like a club song. It's about like girls dancing in a club. I wrote it complete from beginning to end. The lyrics on the other side of the paper were the ones that Tosin discarded. It was the reference to the Virginia Tech shootings, the threat of a mass killing. When Tosin decided to move back to campus sometime later, he threw all his notebooks and paper and clothes into his car to move them to a dorm. One sheet of paper

slipped under the center console. It was the sheet police would later find in his car. Toeson says the police simply had him wrong. He wasn't a terrorist in the making, he was a student, a musician, a budding entrepreneur. He left his car on a campus side road for a simple reason. He'd run out of gas. He says he was going to get more fuel when he got paid at the end of the week. And that loaded gun in his dorm? Tosun agrees he shouldn't have had the gun in campus housing, but he insists it was an innocent mistake.

He'd legally registered the weapon and thought that that made it okay to have it with him on campus. Both Toaston and his friend Thomas say owning guns was not unusual in their part of the Midwest. It just wasn't a big deal. One of the things that I kind of want to like make sure that everybody's clear on is that down in Southern Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri area and all that, there was a pretty big gun culture. So when we moved off campus one of the things that he mentioned that he wanted to do and that we both ended up doing was applying for our void cards. the firearm identification,

that Illinois has, you have to get an ID to own or carry a firearm. Thomas and Toaston both say they had no idea the police were poking around. So when the cops burst into their dorm and arrested Toaston, it came as a complete surprise. So as far as in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, maybe I have a warrant for a ticket or a... I really didn't know what was going on.

And so, I asked them several times that, hey, can I call my dad? Like, I'm gonna call my dad just to let him know what's going on. I can't call my older brother, and they wouldn't let me make any phone calls. He says it wasn't until a couple of days later when Thomas came to visit, that he actually began to understand what was going on. So I picked up the phone and we were talking to him through the glass and first thing he asked me was like,

how am I? I said, I'm fine and I'm just trying to figure out what's going on. And then that's when he says, do you remember that night when we were writing and producing and you wrote the thing about the PayPal account and the thing we got from the law in order episode and I was like yeah and then he says that's what this is about. And so when he said that twice he said that's what this is about. Toson Wari they thought he was a terrorist and then came to charge for attempted terrorist threat. I never heard of a charge like that before. You know attempted terrorist threat. I'd never heard of a charge like that before. You know, attempted terrorist threat.

Not a terrorist threat. Still, Tosun was sure the confusion would soon be cleared up. Tosun's my dad gets here with our lawyer, we'll be able to explain this, and you know, and that'll be the end of it. They made a mistake and we can go back to our lives. Well, when the story hit the news, Tosun says everything got warped.

They were, they were saying saying a Nigerian citizen, Olu Tosun Oduhale, and making it seem like I was like a foreigner that came over here, just the way I was being portrayed as if I was a terrorist. And of course, my name was mispronounced on purpose to make it sound really, really foreign and just different. And they were not describing me like I was a kid born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. The news media kept harping on the note.

They distorted it, Tosin says. And so yes, when you now paint it that way as a note and violence and guns, it's very easy to make anybody feel like, oh yeah, this was one bad guy, because you can craft information and make something appear the way you want to if you have the upper hand. Tosun says no one in law enforcement wanted to hear his side of the story.

Thomas Phillips felt the same. After police initially talked to Thomas, he tried to go back to them and explain that they had it all wrong. It's a shame that I can actually tell somebody like a law enforcement official after the initial interview. This is what actually has happened. Can y'all add this to the story and that no one's gonna hear it

because everybody's minds already made up with what actually appears to be the case. Why did that happen? There were lots of issues. Race, culture, the fear of a mass shooting, and there was the music. After we ran the analysis, we found that in every dimension, rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country.

Stay with us. A few months after Tosin was arrested, a visitor showed up to meet Jeffrey Ordangin, a lawyer who was then a professor at Northwestern University. The man was Toyan Oduwale, Tosun's father. Toyan was unruffled and extremely poised and dignified. Tosun's father wanted Jeffrey to take on his son's case. He was intrigued and agreed. Jeffrey drove five hours south to see Tosun at the Madison County Jail. It was a contact visit because I was an attorney.

And that was our first meeting. He was, if I recall, he was shackled at the ankles and handcuffed at his wrists. And he was a quiet, young guy, great eye contact, not particularly frightened, like so many people are in that situation.

In light of the Virginia Tech massacre, Jeffrey says he understood why police suspected Tosin. But he says they should have quickly figured out that they were off track. Once you did your investigation, you should have known that you were off on a fool's errand. You should have known, and it wouldn't have taken too much effort to realize that he was not plotting or planning some kind of massacre, you could have realized and seen very readily that these were lyrics. In fact, there were lyrics on the opposite side, if I recall, of that note, on both sides. And I believe that there were lyrics throughout the car, and his

apartment when they searched it, they found notebooks with hundreds of pages of rap lyrics. Investigators were unable to find evidence that Toosin had a vile inside. Teachers and students maintained he wasn't threatening. But the prosecution disagreed. State's Attorney Tom Gibbon says, despite Tosin's insistence that what was on the paper were lyrics, he remains certain that they were not. I've probably read at least a thousand pages of his writing to get to know the mind of Old Etosanoda Wally and to understand the difference between the types of writings that he did. And so having and after reviewing all that spending a lot

of time looking at it mostly in my free time at night, I became convinced that in fact this was genuinely a crime. This was an individual planning a very serious crime. This was not prosecuting someone for writing lyrics. This was prosecuting somebody for all of the substantial steps that he had taken toward very serious crimes and potentially a mass casualty event. So now we have two different stories. One is a tale of a potential terrorist plotting a campus massacre. Another is a story of a young man who has unlawfully stored a gun at his university, but otherwise has done little wrong.

It would be up to a jury to decide which story was the truthful one and how to understand those words written on that piece of paper. But before we head to trial, I want to introduce you to one more person. My name is Sharis Kubran, and I'm a professor of criminology law and society at the University of California Irvine. Sharis was called as an expert for the defense in Tosun's case, in part because of some interesting research she's done. She was noticing a large number of prosecutions that were introducing rap lyrics in court. She had a basic question. Are violent lyrics perceived as more threatening, more dangerous, more literal, more in need of regulation, when they are described as rap compared to other music

genres? This question, she felt, was intricately linked to the outcomes of criminal cases. Because prosecutors are using rap lyrics as evidence in these criminal trials, I felt this raises a whole host of questions about whether prosecutors, judges, jurors may be relying on perception and stereotype about rappers and rap music in their interpretation and evaluation of the lyrics. So Sharers devised a study. She pulled lyrics from a 1960s folk song. We identified a set of violent lyrics. It was actually lyrics from this song, Bad Man's Blunder.

And it's a Kingston trio folk group from the 60s. And the lyrics go something like this. Well, early one evening, I was rolling around. I was feeling kind of mean. I shot a deputy down. Strolling on home and I went to bed. Well, I laid my pistol up under my head. Well, early in the morning about the break of day,

I figured it was time to make a getaway. Step and write along, but I was step into slow, got surrounded by a sheriff down in Mexico. Well early in the morning by the break of day I figured it was time to make it get away. Step and write along but I was step and too slow got surrounded by a sheriff down in Mexico. So we took this set of violent lyrics and we told participants in our experiment that they were either rap lyrics or country music lyrics. Sharris then asked them how threatening and offensive they perceived the lyrics to be

and whether they felt the lyrics should be regulated. And after we ran the analysis, we found that in every dimension, rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country. Charis then replicated the study. Again, she didn't play songs for volunteers, she just printed out the lyrics from a Johnny Cash song. Um, called Boyn M. Sue.

But I busted a chair right across his teeth and we crashed through the wall and into the street. And by the way, Johnny Cash gets invoked a lot because everyone knows his song, I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. And so Johnny Cash gets kind of invoked like, well, why can Johnny Cash say lyrics like that? Where he's shooting a man in Reno and there's other violence, but when rappers do it, it's seen as literal. But anyway, we selected these lyrics from a boy named Sue. Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes, and he went down, but to my surprise.

He came up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear, but I busted a chair right across his teeth, and we crashed through the wall and into the street, kicking in a gouging in the mud and the blood in the beer. I tell you, I've pulled tough her men, but I really can't remember when. It kicked like a mule, and it bit like a crocodile. We found that those people who thought that those were rap lyrics were much more likely to evaluate them negatively on all those dimensions compared to those participants in our study who thought they were country. As a criminologist, Sharari says her results are troubling.

I am not necessarily advocating to not find people guilty of a crime that they've committed. What I am advocating for is the use of proper techniques and proper evidence to arrive at that decision. Right now prosecutors are relying too heavily on a form of artistic expression that is fictional, that has a lot of artistic conventions knowing full well that the vast majority of jurors and judges don't really know what the artistic conventions of rat music are.

The prosecutors in this sense are taking shortcuts and it's at the expense of people's lives. And by the way, no other form of artistic expression is treated this way in the courts, because it's not as if rock musicians and heavy metal musicians and punk musicians are having their lyrics introduced as evidence against them. This is happening only for rappers and rap music. On October 18, 2011, in Madison County, Illinois, Oluhtosan Oluwale's trial began. Jeffrey Ordangan says, things went wrong from the start. Oluhtosan Oluwale was a very dark skinned Nigerian young man,

whose interest was rap and the whole defense was centered around rap. The jury was all white, overwhelmingly rural, and the average age was in the 40s and 50s. So if you put that profile together, a 50-year-old white rural juror trying to understand our defense who've none of them, if I recall, had ever listened with any frequency to rap music. Some of them did not know what it was, but this was the jury that we ended up with. And so that was a problem. Tom Gibbons did not argue the case, but supervised the attorneys who did.

He believes they acted with care and caution. I wanted to make absolutely sure that we weren't using the authority of the State's Attorney's Office to prosecute somebody for their thoughts, to prosecute somebody for, in this case, rap lyrics. That's not an appropriate use of the power of a prosecutor's office and the power of law enforcement. Again, much of the attention was focused on that piece of paper that police found in Tosun's car. Tom Gibbon says the defense argued strenuously

that the writing was rap lyrics. Although I have to tell you, one of his lawyers tried to rap the words in this note in trial and it was a miserable failure because these are not rap lyrics. To this comment, Tosin just shakes his head. He admits the lyrics were not very good, which is why he didn't end up using them in a song. But they were still rap. They didn't want to tell people it was rap music, they wanted to say it was a note. So they didn't show where it rhymed,

where it actually rhymed. If you don't know rap music, and I just give you that sentence, where can you make it rhyme? It doesn't look like a rhyme. If this account doesn't reach 50,000, seven days, get ready for a murderous rampage. Simulator to the VT shooting will occur at A-Nother.

How he populated university and this is not a joke. So if you don't know rap music, you won't be able to piece that together. Majority of Southern Illinois Midwestern people that are 40, 50, 60 years old, prosecutors, police officers, they don't know how to break down rat music or anything. So when I said, Hey, that was like a small piece of like a rat first that we didn't even want to use.

They're like, get out of here. He's lying. After a five day trial, the jury returned its verdict guilty. State's attorney Tom Gibbons. The jury convicted Mr. Odo Wally. They took all the evidence into account. They deliberated for I don't recall the amount of time. I think it was a couple hours at least.

And they returned a verdict of guilty on both counts. And he was sentenced to five years in the Department of Corrections on the attempted terrorist threat and a year in the Madison County Jail on the unauthorized possession of a weapon based on the level of the offense. Jeffrey Ordangon says the trial was a disaster. It was a first amendment train wreck in my view. Jeffrey sees two flaws in the prosecution's case. First, they criminalized speech.

By taking a work of art, it's something that was intended as a work of art, something that was intended as a work of art, and distorted it into criminal intent. Second, he says, they criminalized thought. By criminalizing thought, what I mean is, we need to charge this man with a crime because for all we know, he was thinking about acting on what we surmise were evil intense, even though we have no evidence that he intended to communicate that thought. Tosun says his worst moment came after the trial

at the Graham Correctional Center. They strip you naked, they tell you to bend over, they make sure you're not sneaking in any weapons, just a very degrading process. And then when they put me in a cell and then they lock the door and then you hear the clink. And it's a small cell, it's like 5x9. There's two metal bunk beds in there and it's you and another guy. And you just feel so claustrophobic, but you can't leave.

Tosun says it felt like being punched in the gut. Jeffrey Ardangan appealed the conviction. A year and a half later, the case came before an appellate court. The conviction for the terrorist charge was overturned. The court said, in the absence of sufficient evidence that the defendant had taken a substantial step toward making a terrorist threat, his writings, as a warrant as they might be, amount to mere thoughts. Since Stoson's case went to trial, there have been many other cases in which rap artists have had their lyrics introduced as evidence in criminal proceedings.

Criminologist, Charis Cubran. Not a lot of people know that this is happening. I don't think we quite understand the implications of using rap lyrics as evidence. And what that means for defendants. Like, can they get a fair trial? Can we ensure that their First Amendment rights are protected when these lyrics have the potential to bias jurors? When Ahmed is home in New Jersey, Oletos in Oduhale was 31 years old. He says the trial, the conviction, the prison time, he's put all of that behind him.

But one thing still upsets him. Having lyrics he considers embarrassingly bad attached to his name. There's a lot of stuff that you will never hear, that you will never see, because I either didn't think it was good, or I didn't think it would be received well. This was supposed to be one of those things that the world was never supposed to see or hear. Every artist, aspiring or well-established, knows what it's like to try something here. Every artist, aspiring or well-established, knows what it's like to try something and then toss it aside.

The drawings are skew, the photograph is blurry, the verses don't rhyme. The cutting-room floor is littered with false starts and failed attempts, but these dead ends and errors are essential to the artistic process. Toaston never ended up becoming a rap star. He's still a musician, but these days he's more focused on his career in real estate. He's still buying low and selling high. Toaston recently co-founded a real estate hedge fund in Atlanta.

He now has bachelor's degree in business management, and he's hoping to start a family one day. Some of Tosin's music did find the spotlight. People spent hours pouring over his songs, analyzing his words. But like others before him, Tosin discovered that the artist doesn't always control how his creations are understood. Sometimes, the stuff on the cutting room floor ends up being your legacy. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Reina Cohen, Jenny Schmitt and Tara Boyard. Our team includes Pat Shah, Thomas Liu, Laura Quarell and Kat Schuchner. Original music for this episode was composed by Ram Tina Rablewicz.

The song you're hearing was written and performed by Oletosin Odewale. It's called Love Me. This week, we're saying goodbye to our intern, Lu-Sheik Waba. Lu-Sheik has been a vital member of the team from the moment she arrived. She's a stellar audio producer and has helped us build an archive that we can draw on for years to come. She's going to be deeply missed. Thank you, Lushik, for all that you brought to Hidden Brain. Our Ronsang hero this week is Mary Glendini. Mary is a research librarian at NPR and she played a crucial role in tracking down information for the story. Mary and her team are fact checkers, detectives,

masters of the archives, and data experts. Thank you, Mary, and all the researchers at NPR for your very hard work. For more hidden brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. I'm Sean Carvedantum, and this is NPR. Please share it with a friend.

I'm Shankar Vedantum, and this is NPR.