YNW Melly’s murder trial, explained

YNW Melly’s star was rising fast in the fall of 2018. His mixtape I Am You — released that August by 300 Entertainment — was a successful label debut, certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, with its lead single, “Murder On My Mind,” going 6x Platinum. Ben Dandridge-Lemco profiled Melly for The FADER’s GEN F series a day before the project dropped, and production wrapped on a short documentary about his life in late October.

Born Jamell Maurice Demons in Gifford, Florida — an impoverished, unincorporated community in the Vero Beach metro area — when his mother was just 14, Melly came into this world with the odds stacked against him. Nineteen years later, he was a superstar.

On October 26 — four days after the 21-minute movie documenting his rise was completed, according to its credits — two of the men depicted in the film as his closest companions were killed in an apparent drive-by shooting, with Melly and another man also present.

But while he mourned his fallen friends publicly, detectives were gathering evidence to claim that Melly and the fourth man in the vehicle were responsible for killing their companions in cold blood. In February 2019, the state of Florida charged them with two counts each of first-degree murder.

Four-and-a-half years and a mistrial later, Melly is still in Broward County Jail, waiting to be tried for a second time on the same charges. His new trial is scheduled to begin this October, nearly five years to the day since the murders took place. With the retrial starting in less than a month, we break down the key components of the case.

YNW Melly is accused of murdering two members of his crew: Christopher Jermaine Thomas Jr. (a.k.a. YNW Juvy) and Anthony Williams (a.k.a. YNW Sakchaser).

Based on forensic evidence gathered from the vehicle in which they were killed, the state claims Melly and another crew member, Cortlen Malik Henry (a.k.a. YNW Bortlen), committed the double murder on October 26, 2018, in Miramar, Florida, shooting Juvy and Sakchaser from inside a car and then staging the crime scene to look like a drive-by killing. According to the prosecution, they then drove with the dead bodies “for a period of time” before taking them to the hospital, where they were pronounced dead on arrival. Both Melly and Bortlen are charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Both have pleaded not guilty.

There’s a long history of rap lyrics being brought into court as evidence that their authors have committed crimes. Though a lyric can’t be the sole basis of a conviction, it can be highly prejudicial, moving jurors to make up their minds based on priorly held — and, often, racially motivated — biases against rappers. In the YSL RICO indictment, for example, Young Thug’s lyrics have been used to implicate him in 10 separate “overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

California now has a law on the books limiting the admissibility of song lyrics in courtrooms, and similar legislation has been proposed in New York and at the federal level. No such law exists in Florida, where Melly is being tried.

In 2016, a then-16-year-old Melly wrote “Murder On My Mind” while serving time for aggravated assault and discharging a firearm in public. It’s one of the most visceral murder ballads ever written, a detailed first-person account of accidentally killing a friend (“I didn’t even mean to shoot him, he just caught me by surprise”).

The track was initially uploaded to SoundCloud in March 2017 and officially released by 300 Entertainment as a single in June 2018 before appearing on I Am You two months afterwards. Another mixtape and two studio albums later, it’s still his most popular song by far; it’s been streamed nearly a billion times on Spotify alone.

In the wake of Melly’s murder charges, lyrics from the song were cited rampantly on social media, with some on Twitter earnestly suggesting that the two-year-old track and the much-more-recent murders were connected. Then ABC News mentioned “Murder On My Mind” in the headline of an article reporting Melly’s charges, giving the connection editorial weight.

In his August 2018 FADER GEN F interview, Melly claimed a prosecutor had read lyrics from the hit song aloud in court earlier that year during a hearing to determine whether he had violated his probation. In Melly’s opinion, the lyrics had swayed the court to send him back to jail. There have been no reports of the prosecutors in Melly’s double homicide case attempting to introduce “Murder On My Mind” as evidence, despite widespread early speculation on what might happen if they did.

Melly’s defense team first filed for a mistrial in June, claiming the prosecution had introduced evidence that had previously been deemed inadmissible by the court. The evidence in question: statements made out of court by the mother of Melly’s ex-girlfriend, in which she said Melly’s camp had offered to “take care of” her if she refused to testify. Defense attorney David A. Howard called the hearing a “prejudicial fiasco” that the jury had “sat there and watched… unfold with at least 10, maybe 15 sidebars, after every two questions.” Broward County Judge John Murphy denied the motion, allowing the trial to continue.

The defense moved for a mistrial for a second time as Melly’s prosecutors prepared to rest their case. The motion was based on forensic evidence from the crime scene and messages obtained from Melly’s phone by Miramar detective Mark Moretti, including one that simply read, “Shhh. I did that,” in response to a friend asking how he was holding up in the wake of his friends’ deaths. “The DNA evidence is inconclusive, the cell tower evidence… it’s not accurate, and when it’s accurate is not specific,” Howard said, noting that incomplete evidence forces jurors to “speculate.” Judge Murphy denied this motion as well.

The judge’s hand was forced, however, when the jury was unable to come to a unanimous verdict, and he finally declared a mistrial in late July. In an interview with a local ABC affiliate, an anonymous juror blamed the hung jury on the actions of one other juror, the only holdout on declaring a guilty verdict. According to that juror’s anonymous colleague, she “manipulated” two more jurors to join her side. The Broward County District Attorney moved forward with their plan to retry Melly the following week.

Melly’s second double homicide trial was originally set to begin on Monday, October 9. Melly’s first trial lasted 19 days, so seemed possible a verdict could be reached before the end of this month. Unlike the complex, record-breaking RICO trial of his high-profile collaborator Young Thug, Melly’s is a relatively straightforward murder case. (Thug is charged with eight felonies under Georgia’s byzantine Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, whereas Melly is charged with only two counts of murder in the first degree.)

But new complications have arisen in the weeks leading up to the retrial. In a September 27 hearing, Judge Murphy said he’d consider a new motion brought by Melly’s attorneys to dismiss the case against him, and another that demands the Broward County State Attorney’s Office be recused from the case. Both motions allege the prosecution failed to disclose the fact that the case’s lead detective, Miramar’s Mark Moretti, had executed a search warrant to obtain Melly’s mother’s cell phone outside his jurisdiction, rendering the search illegal. Melly’s attorneys have also accused Detective Moretti of using excessive force in the search.

YNW Bortlen’s trial, which was originally scheduled to have its initial hearing on September 29, was pushed back at the last minute to January 12, 2024. Bortlen, who had been out on bond since 2021, was booked in Miami on October 2 on charges that were initially undisclosed.

Bortlen’s arrest warrant cited instances in which he sought to stop witnesses from testifying truthfully — or, in some cases, testifying at all — during Melly’s first murder trial, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Both Bortlen and Melly were formally charged with witness tampering on October 3, along with Broward County inmate Terrence Mathis, who allegedly helped Melly contact Bortlen from jail. Six more related charges have since been added to the original tampering count in a separate capital case from the murder. More details of that case of that case are pending.

On October 6, both sides convened for a hearing on the defense’s motion to recuse the Broward County prosecutors. After the dust settled in a hotly contested hearing that featured countless objections from the prosecution and an incensed defense attorney accusing the prosecutors of a felony, Judge Murphy deferred his decision on the matter.

On Friday, October 13, Judge Murphy recused Assistant State Attorney Kristin Bradley, the lead prosecutor of Melly’s first trial, from the case but allowed the Broward County SAO continue to prosecute the case. The following Tuesday, Murphy approved ASA Alixandra Buckelew — who who helped convict four men accused in the 2018 murder of XXXTentacion — as the case’s new lead prosecutor.

The court still needs to hear testimony on dozens of unresolved motions submitted by the defense and prosecution in the past two weeks. Because of Melly’s constitutional right to a speedy trial, however, Murphy started the trial’s jury selection process on Wednesday, October 18 (the day after Buckelew was sworn in).

Melly’s prosecutors have confirmed that they will seek the death penalty, should Melly be convicted. In July 2022, a judge granted his defense team’s motion to disallow the state to seek capital punishment for Melly, based on the fact that the prosecution had not notified Melly’s team of their intention to do so 45 days before his initial arraignment, as is required in Florida. In November, however, an appellate judge reversed the lower court’s ruling. He determined that the prosecution had, in fact, complied with state regulations and that they could pursue the death penalty in Melly’s case.

The state of Florida is one of 27 states that still use capital punishment — including two (California and Pennsylvania) in which the governors have placed an indefinite moratorium on executions — and has more inmates on death row than any of these states, other than California. As of October 5, Florida held 293 of the 2,363 inmates on death row in the U.S. (The latter number includes 42 prisoners on federal death row, where a moratorium has been placed on executions, and four on military death row, where the death penalty remains in place.) Broward County is a particularly bad place to be convicted of a capital crime. In 2013, it was among the two percent of U.S. counties responsible for 56 percent of the nation’s death row inmates.

In 2019, Melly’s prosecutors stated with confidence that they could prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that he and Bortlen had murdered Juvy and Sakchaser “in a cold, calculated, and premeditated manner without any pretense of moral or legal justification”; that the murders were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel”; and that Melly was a known member of a criminal gang.

Robert Durham — Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center — broke down parts of the capital punishment process in an interview with The FADER that year:

The death penalty phase comes to a head with a second jury vote, Durham continued: “If there is less than a unanimous vote in Florida, the outcome is life [in prison without parole]. If the jury unanimously recommends death, then the case goes to a judge. There's a separate hearing, which is called a Spencer Hearing, and after that hearing the judge determines whether he or she will impose the death penalty.”

But even if the judge signs off on the death penalty in Melly’s case, it’s statistically unlikely that he’ll be executed. “On average, one in seven people who are sentenced to death are ultimately executed — more than 80 percent are not,” Durham said, quoting national numbers. “In Florida, fewer than one in 10 death sentences that are imposed are actually carried out.”

This post is regularly updated to reflect developments in YNW Melly’s retrial.