Many were stunned when footage surfaced this summer that appeared to show Lil Nas X walking naked along Los Angeles’s Ventura Boulevard. It was shortly before 6 a.m., and he was rapping a verse from the song “Monster.”
“So let me get this straight, wait, I’m the rookie? But my features and my shows 10 times your pay?” he said, quoting Nicki Minaj’s lines from the Kanye West track.
But to some, more surprising were the crimes the 26-year-old rapper and pop star was charged with shortly after the Aug. 21 incident, where authorities accused him of assaulting officers. The musician, whose legal name is Montero Lamar Hill, now faces four felony charges: three counts of battery with injury on a police officer, and one count of resisting an executive officer.
“Four felony counts seems excessive,” one person wrote recently on social media.
The post sparked an online conversation about charge stacking — which is when prosecutors file multiple criminal charges against a defendant for the same incident — and the disproportionate impact this practice has on Black Americans.
Hill pleaded not guilty to the charges at his arraignment on Aug. 25, and he was released on $75,000 bail. A condition of his release was to attend four Narcotics Anonymous meetings a week or attend outpatient treatment. He was briefly taken to a hospital after the incident for a possible overdose and then transferred to a jail, before he was released.
If convicted, the Grammy Award-winning artist could face up to five years in state prison.
“Attacking police officers is more than just a crime against those individuals but a direct threat to public safety,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman said in a news release on Aug. 25. “Anyone who assaults law enforcement will face serious consequences, no matter who they are or how famous they may be.”
Hill’s lawyer, Christy O’Connor, said in court that “assuming the allegations here are true, this is an absolute aberration in this person’s life” and that “nothing like this has ever happened to him.”
Alaizah Koorji, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told Capital B that the charges, and the jail time Hill could face, seem “extremely punitive.”
“That’s why I think that people are reacting this way,” she said. “We know that at every single stage of our criminal legal process — from what happens at arraignment to whether a person sits in jail for the duration of their case to whether a person is charged to how juries make decisions — there’s anti-Black discrimination.
“And we know that charge stacking is a key feature of this system.”
As the artist awaits his next court appearance this month, here’s more on what charge stacking is, how the practice affects Black communities, and which questions it raises about the efficacy of traditional policing during incidents involving emotional distress.
What, exactly, is charge stacking?
In its simplest form, it’s the practice of charging a defendant with multiple counts of criminal activity that all spring from the same incident.
One way to think about it, according to Koorji, is something like this: Say it’s Halloween, and someone goes into a Duane Reade and steals a bunch of stuff. That’s only one incident. But if a prosecutor wants to stack charges, they might file a separate petty larceny charge for every item the defendant stole.
Charge stacking is also common when it comes to drug-related offenses. Someone might be charged not just for possession but also for intent to distribute and trafficking.
At the charging stage, a prosecutor doesn’t need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt, Koorji said. That comes later — at the trial stage. As long as there’s a sufficiently plausible basis that a person could be charged with something, she said, you might see a prosecutor pile on charges.
Why do prosecutors pursue charge stacking?
Charge stacking, Koorji said, creates pressure for a defendant to enter into a plea deal.
“If every single defendant exercised their right to go to trial, well, we don’t have the resources for that, and the system would break,” she added. “There’s an incentive for the prosecution to create a scenario where a defendant is looking at all of the penalties they’re exposed to and making them feel risk-averse [so that a better plea can be extracted].”
A 2023 analysis in the Harvard Law Review illustrates why a defendant might enter into a plea deal when prosecutors can “divide crime and multiply punishment.”
“Accounting for a host of variables, empirical legal research has demonstrated that multiple criminal charges significantly raise the odds of a guilty verdict by more than 10%,” the analysis noted. “The effect increases with the number of charges, and the weaker the government’s case, the stronger the effect multiple charges have.”
For instance, at one federal charge, the conviction rate is 82%; at five or more charges, the conviction rate is 91%. This trend is true, the analysis found, not only at the federal level but also at the state level, where governments charge “multiple offenses more often than the federal government does.”
How does charge stacking affect Black communities?
Black Americans are disproportionately surveilled, arrested, and jailed, and charge stacking plays a role in this disparity, Koorji said.
So severe is this racial inequality that the NAACP in 2019 published a resolution opposing charge stacking at every level of government.
“The stacking of charges has become standard practice to build such a horrifying potential sentence, that even actually innocent people will be intimidated into pleading guilty,” NAACP members wrote in the resolution.
Pleading guilty is viewed as a safer option, according to the resolution, than facing what’s known as the trial penalty: “a very scary long sentence if the defendant should somehow be convicted at trial.”
In some ways, Koorji said, Hill is lucky. The star had the means to post bail and hire a private attorney, and these moves may have tamped down the pressure to plead guilty.
Even so, as Koorji sees it, Lil Nas X’s case shines a light on how the criminal legal system needs to improve, especially when someone appears to have a substance abuse issue or could be experiencing a mental health episode.
This appears to be a situation where it may have been better to have a social worker, mental health professional, or somebody else more likely to be trained in deescalating situations attend to the incident, she said.
“If we’re using this case to educate ourselves on these kinds of police encounters, this seems like it was a non-emergency call,” Koorji said. “And if we were to think about police reform, maybe this wouldn’t have warranted a police call at all.”
Lil Nas X spoke in 2020 about how fame has tested his mental health, and his father underscored last month the strain his son has endured as a provider for his family. Despite these challenges, however, he recorded a hopeful message for his Instagram Stories on Aug. 25.
“That was terrifying. That was a terrifying last four days,” the “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” rapper said in the video post. “But your girl’s gonna be alright.”