He cooperated fully with the police, confessed to his involvement in the chat and hoped that the justice system would find him innocent of the charges. Though Ade had been stopped and searched dozens of times by police officers, his mother said, he had no prior convictions and is still in prison as he weighs up his dreams of becoming a lawyer. Quinn said rap was also often treated as "autobiography or a documentary or a diary entry," while also "just giving a sense of bad character, of propensity to violence." It gives them a sense that there's a kind of public safety issue." ![]() It pervades the whole courtroom," she said. ![]() "When rap video after rap video is played in court, the jurors do not know what to make of the rap music. "The music becomes the soundtrack for shoring up the idea of the gang, in the space often of hard evidence that should be needed when such serious charges are on, and people's lives are on the line," Quinn said. Particularly when large groups of men are on trial together, the music "brings in stereotypes about criminality, about violence" into the courtroom, she said, often also conflating the young men on trial with those that appear in music videos. In several situations, artists have rapped about real life murders, and, in the U.K., both the courts and police have exercised powers to censor a number of prominent drill artists on the grounds that they incite crime.Įithne Quinn, a professor of cultural studies at the University of Manchester, who has served as an independent expert in legal cases involving rap, told ABC News the use of drill lyrics against defendants is "very, very frequent" at trial. "This positive outcome should reassure members of the public and warn offenders that those involved in both the planning and execution of acts of violence will be prosecuted and brought to face justice, where they should expect to feel the full force of the system." "Their plans, some of which had been executed and others which remained in planning, posed a serious threat of harm to their targets as well as a very real risk to members of the public," local police said in a statement following the sentencing. Ade, now 19, was sentenced to eight years in prison for conspiracy to commit assault. Police said other participants did go onto commit violent crimes, but the online chat formed the basis of the prosecutor's argument that this group of young Black men were all involved as a violent gang. No harm came to that individual whatsoever." There was no attack on the individual that was named. "The messages that he sent were he speculated about somebody who he had heard was involved in the killing, and he sent a post code around where that person might possibly be," Reece Williams, Ade's former mentor at a youth charity he was involved in, told ABC News. The individual named by Ade was not hurt, his lawyers at the time said. Ade acknowledged to his role in sending the text messages, describing it as a "moment of madness" as he processed the grief of losing a friend. ![]() Investigators said they found "hundreds of thousands of communications" proving that the group had "entered in to an agreement to kill or seriously injure a number of individuals."Īccording to Ade's lawyers, his involvement was to send a handful of messages in a Telegram chat, set up by Soyoye's friends, where he shared a postal code and a screengrab of a map of someone he believed to be a perpetrator. Ade, who was 17 at the time of Soyoye's death, was not even part of M40, they say, he merely liked listening to drill music. Prosecutors alleged that Ade belonged to a gang, named M40 after their local zip code, who had plotted a revenge attack after one of their members, Ade's friend Alexander John Soyoye, was stabbed to death in 2020.īut, according to his family and defense team, the gang was not a "gang" at all - but instead a loose music collective creating songs as part of the young but increasingly popular genre of U.K. As part of a charity initiative, he had authored a book about inspiring his local community in Moston, Manchester, made an address to parliament and was seen by family and friends as driven by a "passion for helping people."īut in July 2022, Ademola - known by those close to him as Ade - was sentenced to prison as part of a gang along with nine other young Black men. MANCHESTER - Ademola Adedeji had a place secured to study law at a top university in England.
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