Damian Lewis: ‘Someone put flowers at my feet and I realised it was my stalker’

The actor on bloodcurdling stage experiences, back yard cricket and the best advice he’s ever received Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email In the spirit of your role as Lord Davenport in Fackham Hall – what is the poshest thing you have ever done? Taking a helicopter to Royal Ascot. That is one of the poshest things I have done. I became aware of how posh it was when I started calming down and realised I wasn’t going to fall out of it. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/kCc1qpS via IFTTT

‘It has become a sort of silver bullet’: why are rap lyrics being put on trial?

In compelling documentary As We Speak, a controversial legal practice that uses rap lyrics to secure convictions is explored

In September 2001, McKinley Phipps Jr, also known as the rapper Mac, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for manslaughter. It had been a year and a half since gunfire erupted outside a club where he was slated to perform in Slidell, Louisiana, resulting in the death of 19-year-old Barron Victor Jr. Phipps, then 22, maintained his innocence, and the case against him was weak – there was no gun linking him to the crime, several witnesses recanted their testimony and another person confessed to pulling the trigger. And yet, prosecutors had their trump card: Mac, a former New Orleans rap prodigy who began releasing music at the age of 13, had rapped about murder.

“Murder, murder, kill, kill”, Phipps recites in As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a new documentary on the criminalization of rap lyrics. Prosecutors spliced that line with one from a different song – “Pull the trigger, put a bullet in your head” – to create the portrait of a killer; Mac’s art was the evidence that DNA, solid confessions, or a missing weapon couldn’t provide. An all-white jury bought it. Phipps served over 21 years in prison before being granted clemency in 2021.

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