A Late-Stage Alternative Confession
During the trial, prosecutors claimed Broadnax had confessed to the killings in jailhouse interviews and shown no remorse. But in an effort to stop Broadnax’s execution, his cousin, Cummings, released a statement proclaiming that he was actually the shooter in the crimes, saying, “I want to clear my conscience and do not want James to be executed for shooting two people when I was the one who committed those acts.”
Broadnax’s lawyers claimed in court that Cummings’ DNA was found on the gun and inside the pocket of one of the men who died. "When [his lawyer] told me on February 20 that James was scheduled to be executed on April 30, 2026, I decided it was time to come clean, and I told him that it was me, and not James, who had shot the two victims," Cummings said in his confession.
Cummings claimed he’d previously convinced his then-19-year-old cousin to take the blame for the crimes when both men had been high on PCP and marijuana.
“The late-stage alternative confession from [Broadnax’s] cousin is where I think the injustice argument gets its teeth,” Emma Alves, a senior lawyer at Alves Law, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Courts set an almost impossibly high bar for introducing new evidence post-conviction, especially at the execution stage. The legal standard asks whether the evidence would probably produce a different verdict, and courts interpret that conservatively. So even a direct confession from another person can get dismissed on procedural grounds. It is a structural gap in how post-conviction relief works when the death penalty is on the table.”
In a video plea to spare his life, Broadnax also claimed his previous confession had been false and that he’d been on drugs during the television interviews in which he’d claimed he committed the crime. “I wish I could show them my soul, so they could see just how sorry I am,” Broadnax said. “I am very much remorseful for everything that happened.”
Dr. Kenya Brumfield-Young, criminologist and assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Saint Louis University, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that “having another person confess late in the process is not enough to prove someone’s innocence.”
“But in a death penalty case, it should at least raise serious concerns,” she continues.“Post-conviction innocence claims are supposed to handle the fact that wrongful convictions often don’t become apparent until well after trial, sometimes many years later, when there’s new evidence. After an execution, the system has no way to course correct if that later confession turns out to be true.”
Rap Lyrics Brought Up in Court
In an earlier appeal, Broadnax’s attorneys claimed that prosecutors had misused 40 pages of rap lyrics Broadnax had previously written in order to portray him as someone with “future dangerousness,” a required factor when considering capital sentencing for criminal defendants in Texas. The appeal alleged that the use of rap lyrics as evidence against Broadnax was unconstitutional.
Famous rappers like Travis Scott, Killer Mike and Young Thug asserted in a statement that the use of the misrepresented lyrics marked a violation of Broadnax’s First Amendment rights. Scott wrote in a brief that rap lyrics shouldn’t necessarily be taken literally.
“The rap lyrics issue is deeply troubling because creative writing is not the same thing as a confession,” Michael La Fratta, a Virginia-based criminal defense attorney, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “A song, poem, screenplay or notebook full of lyrics can be violent, ugly, exaggerated, fictional, performative or written from a persona. That does not automatically make it autobiography.”
La Fratta likens “treating rap lyrics as literal evidence” to “treating every crime novelist as if they are confessing to the crimes in their books.”
“Nobody assumes every country singer, novelist or actor means everything they perform,” he continues. “Rap lyrics should not be treated as a diary entry just because the defendant is young, Black and unpopular with the jury.”
La Fratta explains that when a “jury is deciding future dangerousness,” bringing lyrics in as a character exhibit takes the conversation from, “what did a defendant to?” to “what kind of person do we think he is?”
Brumfield-Young emphasizes that rap lyrics have been used in a large number of cases, usually in “criminal cases, overwhelmingly impacting young Black men.”
“Prosecutors have used rap to convince judges and juries that defendants are guilty, had a motive to commit a crime, or are likely to be dangerous in the future,” she says. “Scholars Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis wrote about this issue in [the book] Rap on Trial.”
James Broadnax’s Execution
Despite his attempt to appeal, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected Broadnax’s request for either a reprieve or a commutation of his death sentence.
Broadnax claimed prosecutors had purposefully removed prospective Black jurors from the selection pool, resulting in a jury that was almost entirely white, with only one Black juror making the final cut.
"There are obvious reasons for the state engaging in jury selection discrimination," Sheri Johnson, a professor at the Cornell Law School who consulted on Broadnax's case, told KERA News, "and that's that they made racially inflammatory arguments in the process of the trial, arguments that would have been more attractive to white jurors than to Black jurors."
Broadnax was executed via lethal injection on April 30, 2026.
