Hey, there's Shankar here. The hidden brain team has been transfixed by the nationwide protests in recent weeks. The enormous number of demonstrators may be new, but the biases they're protesting are not. In 2017, we produced an episode on a little-known form of racial bias.
We decided to return to that episode now, as many people are pushing for reforms in the criminal justice system. Please note that the episode includes the sounds of shootings from a college campus, as well as music with violent and explicit language. Here's the episode. On a chilly April morning in 2007, a nightmare unfolded on a college campus in Virginia, a 23-year-old student acting alone opened fire in a dormitory.
He shot and killed two students. Then he walked across campus and began killing people in an engineering building. The sound of gunfire was caught on a student's cell phone. We weren't sure what it was.
It was done shots, but for a while we thought it was a construction. We heard this horrible scream and laughter. Tina Harrison was a student in the building. We were sitting in the classroom and basically panicked for a guy.
All we could hear was people screaming, laughter and more screaming. And I counted 24 gunshots within a minute and I lost track after that. I just started praying. By the time the assault ended, 32 people were dead.
The gunman took his own life. The shooting at Virginia Tech was quickly seared into our minds as one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history. Unfortunately, it's been followed by many other school shootings, including the killing of 17 students in Parkland, Florida. In all these cases, the news media has struggled to convey the sheer scale of the massacre.
There is terror and then sorrow today at the campus of Virginia Tech. An act of evil on a scale that we've never seen in this country before. Four hours after the news began to break, Blacksburg, Virginia is still in shock from its wounds and so but even as the country mourned, people began to ask why campus officials hadn't been more proactive. Why hadn't they spotted the warning signs?
Why hadn't they locked down the school after the first shooting in the dawn? At a press conference, campus police tried to explain. We had information from witnesses and the evidence at the scene that led us to believe the sheer was no longer in the building and more likely off campus. Reporters grilled officials who at times seemed lost for words.
Chief, can you outline your Blackout policy for the university? Are you saying that do we have a policy to lock down the campus? Yeah, I might win. I don't know what circumstances can do it.
What's your timeframe? It's not in my communications plan. Eventually, the state of Virginia and the university paid victims' families more than 11 million dollars to settle lawsuits. Across the nation, universities scrambled to improve their security protocols.
Many added expensive upgrades to emergency alert systems and hired new police officers to stay on top of possible danger. Awareness took hold on college campuses. A subtle fear was in the air, a low-grade buzz of anxiety. People weren't taking chances.
At schools like Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, small things that were out of place led to intense scrutiny. His car was discovered, parked in a very conspicuous, very unusual, no parking area at the university here in Edwardsville. They found, you know, visible in the car, a note. Like Central Fresh Air Stripro and Stay 2 Pack on the 8-year-old offer ends Sunday.
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Okay Frank, back it up. Keep coming. Go, go, go, go. Frank just got himself a new Kia EV2.
He loves everything about the car. How it looks, how it drives, its class leading range and its highly impressive spec. In fact, the only thing Frank can't get used to is how much bigger it feels than it actually is. Go, go, go, go.
Discover the EV2 for yourself at your nearest Kia dealer, Kia. Movement and inspires. Three months after the Virginia Tech massacre, an Illinois gun dealer picked up the phone and called the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He told an agent that he was worried about a client who was trying to purchase guns.
It was the first time he'd ever made a report to the ATF and I think about 10 years of being a gun seller, a gun dealer. Tom Gibbons is the Madison County, Illinois, State's Attorney. Tom says the man who contacted the gun dealer was agitated and adamant. He said he needed the guns quickly.
And what he was purchasing was unusual. He was buying three low-cost exact same models of a gun, semi-automatic handgun, a 380 caliber. The gun dealer explained that the man, whose name was Oletosun Odoale, had purchased the gun's wholesale on the internet and needed him, a licensed transfer agent, to complete the transaction. Oletosun's background check was clean, but the gun dealer felt something wasn't right.
The ATF suspected Oletosun might possibly be a straw purchaser, someone buying guns for someone else. But Tom Gibbons says police also considered more sinister motives. Having three identical weapons, if a person's going to do something harmful or commit a mass casualty event, having three identical firearms has the advantage of being able to use the identical ammunition to use the exact same magazines with that ammunition no matter which of the guns you're using. And of course buying low-cost multiple weapons allows you to have multiple weapons available at a single time.
The ATF quickly learned that Oletosun was a student that's southern and all university. The ATF contacted the local police department and they began to look into it. According to documents later filed in court, the ATF agent also called campus police detective Rick Weisenborn. The ATF gave the detective a heads up that Oletosun had ordered weapons over the internet.
Rick Weisenborn wrote a memo to his colleague that advised them to use caution if they encountered the young man. Two days later, a police officer on a routine campus patrol came across an unattended car. He alerted Rick Weisenborn, who went to investigate. Police traced the license plate to Oletosun Oletwale.
His car was discovered, parked in a very conspicuous, a very unusual, no parking area of the university here in Edward'sville. Police monitored the vehicle to see if anyone approached it. For two days, Rick Weisenborn drove past the car himself. No one showed up.
The detective notified his supervisor. Campus police were authorized to tow a vehicle that had been left unattended for more than 24 hours. So when his car was being towed, the police department policy that the car is inventory, they take an inventory of the contents and they found, you know, visible in the car, a note. It was protruding from underneath the center console.
It had writing on both sides. On one side, well, what seemed like rablurics? Turn the page over and there were more lyrics. Tom says they read like this.
And you may have to bleep some of this out. I lead a follower. I'm single and not with her, but she got a throat deeper than a sword swallower. Further down on the page was more writing.
Tom says these were not lyrics. Send two dollars to and then it's a PayPal account. If the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days, then a murderous rampage similar to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university. And then then in all capital letters, this is not a joke.
Police didn't take it as one. Detective Rick Weisenborn took photos of the vehicle. While snapping pictures of the backseat, he noticed released traps and pulled them to lower the seatbacks. He found a ward of clothing.
There was a long sleeve shirt, a short sleeve shirt, and a knit cap with a ski mask. The detective seized all of it. Officers also found six rounds of 25 caliber ammunition in the car. They felt they needed to act fast.
It was pretty early in the morning. I remember and I just got in the shower. This is Thomas Phillips, the third. He was Oletosin Oletwale's roommate that summer.
He remembers a loud pounding on the door. And there's about eight police officers standing there. Thomas was asked to step out of the room. Police told Oletosin he was under arrest.
Oletosin was wearing basketball shorts and a tank top. He didn't have shoes on. They cut them. They had his hands back.
And he didn't look my way when he came up. I don't also think that he saw where I was sitting because I was sitting off to the silent stairs. But they took him out the long way towards the back where they had a car waiting for him. A search of the dorm room uncovered a camcorder, video cassettes, and a Dell laptop computer.
Tom Gibbons says there was also something else. A Jennings 25 caliber pistol. The loaded firearm. The gun belonged to Oletosin.
So let's review. A young man attempts to purchase multiple guns over the internet. His describe is agitated and anxious by a gun dealer involved in the transaction. The ATF launches an investigation.
The young man's car is found apparently abandoned on campus side road. Inside it is a piece of paper with a threat on it, alluding to ransom and a possible massacre on a university campus. When the young man is arrested, a loaded gun is discovered in his dorm room. States Attorney Tom Gibbons says police felt they had prevented a serious crime.
So connecting the dots, it became apparent that in fact he was planning. He was, if not planning, an actual mass casualty event, he was planning to be able to be incredibly threatened that. And he was taking steps, actual steps towards making a terrorist threat. It wasn't long before the news media got a hold of the story.
Coming just after the Virginia Tech shooting, the story generated well to well coverage. Thomas Phillips. For I'd say about a week solid, news coverage had his face on CNN, MSNBC. Like, you know, pretty much any news station you could turn to that headline news.
And he was either the first or second subject of it. That's all we saw on the news of him was pretty much. He's a terrorist. He planned his entire attack, you know, the threatening note in his car, there was ammunition.
He was purchasing guns to either fund his attack or carry the attack out. They showed a table of guns that he never got, but that he wanted to actually buy at some point. It turned out Olutoshan had actually ordered four guns off the internet, three of them low caliber guns identical to one another. And the other was a 45 caliber Mach 10 semi-automatic.
States Attorney Tom Gibbons. That is a high high capacity, certainly a high caliber. It's a scary, certainly a scary-looking gun. As reporters pressed for answers, the investigation grew.
Friends were contacted, evidence collected. Then police discovered something important during the investigation that were computer seized. And something that was located on his girlfriend's computer was a file that he had created in a program called Movie Maker. And what he had made was a video with this language that was found in the note.
It was language that read, do you remember the chaos at Virginia Tech? Well, guess what? It's going to happen again in June 2007, unless the viewers of this collectively deposited a total of $200,000 in the following PayPal account. Or else, the number of students killed in Virginia Tech will be topped during the summer school semester at a target university.
This is not a joke. Tom Gibbons told me that the language was found in a file that had been deleted. If the video was deleted, how did you know what was in it? Well, because nothing is ever really completely deleted off a computer.
Our forensic examiners were able to go in and take an image of the hard drive after securing it and extract and do an analysis of all the data that remains on a hard drive. On July 24, 2007, all the tools in Odewale was formally charged with storing a weapon in campus housing and a far more serious crime attempting to make a terrorist threat. The case that was made was effectively that he had constructed this threat. He was planning to use this threat either to act upon it.
It was either that or he was trying to extort money. It was a strange charge, an attempt to make a threat. But since prosecutors couldn't prove the threat had actually been communicated to anyone, that was the best they could do. I would say that there was only one step missing that we couldn't prove, and that was the actual public posting of the threat.
That was the only last piece of evidence that we didn't have that would have made it a completed terrorist threat. But Tom felt they had plenty of proof showing planning, preparation, and effort to purchase firearms. It's like a conspiracy type of case. It's not exactly conspiracy, but in the same vein, a person is taking actual substantial steps toward the commission of the offense.
And by doing that, they are in effect attempting to commit it. I asked Tom if this was like someone who does some research on how to hire a hitman, but doesn't act on it. Well, I would liken it more to the person who takes the gun, drives to the intended victim's house, and for whatever reason, doesn't get out of the car. But they've taken an actual substantial step toward the act toward the murder.
It's more than just thinking about it. It's more than just a little bit of research. There was a substantial amount of work that went into this. So I like the analogy that you have just now.
And I'm curious from a legal perspective what you do with that, because let's say someone does buy a gun and does drive to someone's house and doesn't get out of their car and drives off. And let's say the authorities have some way of knowing about all of this happening. Can you charge that person with a crime? In the murder context, no.
In the threatening context, you can't, because they're taking actual steps. They're creating things. They're creating the threat. In Tom Gibbons mind, a catastrophe had been averted.
But had it? To find out, I went to meet the man who police described as a dangerous would-be terrorist. Stay with us. At DID Electrical, we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting.
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Live every day. Today, the story of a young man accused of an attempted terrorist attack. That young man is Olatosun Oduwale. It's a Nigerian name, but it was given to a boy who was born and raised in St.
Louis, Missouri. You know, as a kid, me and my brothers and our friends and neighborhood used to play in our backyard. We used to go out into the woods and play hide and seek and cops and robbers and all that good stuff. And we used to ride our bikes all throughout the neighborhood.
Olatosun's parents left Nigeria and emigrated to the United States when they were young. Tosa, as he was called, was raised with his five brothers in a six-bedroom house in St. Louis. He was surrounded by music.
Lots and lots of music. I fell in love with music probably around seven or eight years old. You know, I grew up listening to out of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, out of West Coast music.
I'm a little bit of like bigy and naz but majority West Coast music. What Tosa is talking about here is 90-style gangster rap straight out of LA. Young men like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were riding their talent into stardom.
Gangster rap evolved from hip hop. It's long being controversial because it emphasizes the gangster lifestyle and at times promotes violence, misogyny, drugs and murder. But it's popular and commercially very lucrative. For a kid like Tosa, he was magnetic.
He was all in. In eighth grade, specifically as an eighth grade, me and a lot of my friends used to start like rapping at the lunch table with freestyle and some I would do the beat on the table and we'd just go on a circle with freestyling. You know, it'd be like seven or eight of us. And we would do this every single day literally every single day.
And it was just a lot of profanity, a lot of just okay we can finally say what we want to say and give me an example. Okay so UGK has a song called Take It Off which was really really big around like like 95 to 98. And so that was a really really big song. How does it go?
It was, you're from the only spot. It was um, take it off trick band. Over let me see it. If you're looking for a trail type nigga let me beat it got the V12 Benz parked outside.
It ain't another room that's looking good. It's something like that. You love this one you're a 12? Oh yeah definitely.
And so this stayed with you for a long time. Oh of course that's one of my most favorite, favorite um groups of when I was a kid. The music itself was what moved it. Like the rhythm, the bass, the drums, the hi-hats.
It was kind of like um it was just like a feel. You know like I think what really makes people gravitate to what music and how it makes them feel. And so hip hop itself. I mean um even if you're not necessarily from the culture you know it probably makes you feel a certain way.
It makes you feel strong, bragadocious free. It makes you feel creative. Tossen had a dream that maybe someday he could make a name for himself as a rap star. But when he was 14 his father sent him abroad for school first to England and then to Nigeria.
Now that might not seem the best move for an aspiring rap artist but Tossen says his Nigerian boarding school was full of kids like him. So I was surrounded around a lot of people from New Jersey, New York, Atlanta, California and London and a lot of them made music. And so a lot of what we used to do in Nigeria when we were in the dorms is that we would write rap music and I think it was in Nigeria where I really really got I guess like creative and better and because we were able to just really lock in you know in America I was only with my friends at school seven hours a day. Nigeria I'm with the 24 hours a day for three months you know and so it was um yeah it was it was where I guess I fell in love with it more was when I was in Africa.
It was in Nigeria that Tossen made his public debut as a rapper in church he went to a Christian school and each Sunday the entire school went to church. It was a huge church. Well sometimes they would allow students in the church to either sing songs on stage or do whatever performances we decided to do a rap. A Christian rap in front of the entire congregation 2,500 people.
When Tossen tells the story you can hear his happiness just remembering that moment. I run on stage with the mic and everybody's like and everybody like praising you and then I started rapping nobody heard what I said but they were going crazy and it was like this is a church I really fed my ego like oh man people love me you know like whatever it's just church but um that that was really really um I guess a confidence builder as far as I go okay you can take your raps away from just your circle of friends and actually like say them to the public. When Tossen was in his last year of high school in Nigeria he applied to go to college in the United States. He had only one school in mine southern and all university.
It appealed to him because it was close to St. Louis close to his family his friends his home he was accepted. In the fall of 2005 he started his freshman year. Tossen describes it as a pretty typical introduction to college life classes parties students always moving together in huge groups.
In the spring Tossen decided to join a fraternity. He chose and was accepted by Ayoda Phi Theta and historically African-American frat. Thomas Phillips met Tossen through the fraternity. He remembers his first glimpse of him because Tossen stood out.
He's a little bit of kid wearing a gigantic hoodie and the biggest headphones. Vintage headphones. So you know like back in like the 80s when they first had like the home stereo headphones that were like the big gigantic cushion pairs with the metal braces on the sides. Like once you were necessarily where out in public you might listen to like these headphones in the comfort of your own home.
But something about those headphones and him being as small as he was then kinda stuck out to me. So as it turned out he was really big in the music especially rap music and that was the best pair of headphones he could find at the time they gave him the best sound quality. So the two became good friends. Thomas Sussen was big-hearted.
He looked out for people. He often announced fraternity brothers to help him check up on the homeless in the area. He organized campus events including a speech by former Black Panther Bobby Seal and he drew people together with his music. It was music that made him such a good fit for the fraternity.
At the time most of us in the fraternity at least had some kind of musical talent like if you didn't play instrument you song if you couldn't sing you rap. If you couldn't do any of the three which I can't then you were either producer or mixer. Tossen of course, wrapped. Thomas produced.
They started talking about making it big. As Thomas describes those days to me he says it's important to understand one thing about Tossen. His music meant everything to him but it wasn't him. So one of the things that I did know this was that as much as Tossen his personality his actual personality came through in his actions his music was entirely different.
Tossen did relish songs with violent and misogynistic lyrics but that didn't mean that he was a violent or misogynistic person. One of his favorite groups at the time was P6 Mafia. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him or not but a lot of their music at the time was pretty much the version of rock and roll was like sex and drugs kind of deal. Eventually Thomas and Tossen decided to move in together.
They found a ratty two bedroom apartment not far from campus. Thomas says it was perfect. Meaning like if you want to wrap about you know how hard your life is and how you know there's a lot of crime in your area and you want to wrap about what's real like this is the place that you can actually do it and it feels authentic because you're not actually recording this from you know you know a nice apartment in St. Louis someplace you know recording this in a hotel or in a penthouse or a nice recording studio.
We were in the basement they're roaches everywhere and we recorded this in the closet. You know because our studio was in the living room there was a closet in the living room which was for coats like no one else can take the coach put them in the closet. We turned that closet into a studio booth so our microphone was in there we put foam all over the walls to kind of soundproof it and that was the studio booth. The apartment became a rapsilon or as Tossen puts it an artist in and so that was how it was.
It was pieces of paper and notebooks everywhere in the living room a couch a TV a computer studio equipment microphone keyboard and that was our art space. They were experimenting writing rewriting trying to compose songs that worked they played a couple of gigs on campus sometimes they handed out free CDs to get their name out but money was always tight and they needed better equipment. Tossen views himself as an entrepreneur he probably points out that he came from a family of self-studders so he says he started looking for opportunities to make some extra cash he landed on an idea one that in retrospect might not have been the best it involved the internet and guns. And so I was thinking okay you know maybe this could be like a beginner business where I could buy these guns very cheap from the manufacturers online have them shipped to a local dealer and then resell them for retail price and make a little bit of money and we could use this money and buy all the equipment that we could dream of because that was one thing that was kind of harming us our first six or seven months the equipment that we were recording music with was very bad it was just you know the final songs they'd be a lot of static and it would be just new we needed better equipment.
What Tossen was thinking of is called drop shipping it's used all the time in online sales when you buy a product online from a retailer that product isn't necessarily sitting in the retailer's warehouse sometimes the retailer has to order it from a wholesaler you've paid for a product the retailer doesn't physically possess Tossen thought he could adapt this model to the online gun market buy guns wholesale and then mark up the price. The basic business idea was buy low sell high period. Tossen advertised guns with sale online once people bought them he ordered the guns from the wholesaler but with gun sales there's a catch guns bought wholesale must go through a licensed gun dealer before they can pass on to a buyer that didn't worry Tossen he wasn't doing anything illegal he contacted a local gun dealer and asked him to put through the transaction and so that was what I was doing you know I never took possession of those guns I never intended to I never did. Tossen agrees that he called the gun dealer repeatedly to ask about the weapons but that's because he says he had already accepted money from buyers and needed to complete the transaction so to recap we have a young man with big dreams he's got a budding career as a rapper an active social life and a commitment to community service he's buying guns but only he says to sell them and make a little extra cash for music equipment this is not a picture of a would-be terrorist but that brings us to that piece of paper that police found in Tossen's car as states attorney Tom Gibbons put it they found you know visible in the car a note it had music lyrics on one side but a threat on the other.
Send two dollars to an innocent PayPal account if the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days then a murderous rampage similar to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university and then in all capital letters this is not a joke. It would be hard to explain a way a note like this demanding ransom threatening a campus massacre but Tossen says the problem lies in one word note what the police found he insists was not a note it was scribbled ideas for a rapson this is how Tossen says it all unfolded it began as an idea one night in the artist den Tossen had just finished watching the tv show law and order the episode was about some bloggers who live stream their home on social media. So it's me Willow again a lot of you commented on the fight that holds him and I had in yesterday's video and so the way the episode started off while they were live streaming just hanging out masked men kicking the door kidding at the girl beat up a boyfriend and then later they get back on her online page and saw the ransom. Tossen was fascinated by the episode he loved the way it played with viewers all the way through it kept people guessing whether watching an actual kidnapping take place online whether watching performance art Tossen thought the premise might make a cool spoken introduction to a rapson and so that was where the idea I was trying to figure out something I tried to figure out something that would be real to what's actually in life like there is PayPal and there is YouTube and there is etc etc and so it was kind of like a copy of that but it's something that wasn't as fake as that something else actually real.
Sometimes rapsons start this way with introductions that set a scene with lyrics that don't rhyme that says Tossen's friend Thomas is what they were playing with. You heard the introduction to Nas' it was written? I haven't. How does it go?
It starts off with two slaves in the field and this is said back in you know slavery days so in American history so what happens is that the two slaves here the overseer coming and they decide to stage a revolt right at that point. And you hear the slaves beating the master down and then you hear the you know the slaves being dragged away once they're voting pretty much quail at that point so it's an introduction that draws you in and you hear this violent introduction and then the lead song comes on. Tossen wondered whether the demand for a ransom and the threat of a campus shooting could make for a good intro. The friends played with the idea and tried out a few things.
They wrote some lyrics on a piece of paper. They even made a lyric video where the words of a song scroll on the screen. Tossen felt it didn't work but some of the lines he wrote on the other side of the paper did eventually become a song. It was called Poppy Mummy Poppy.
It's like a club song. It's about like girls dancing in a club. Poppy Mummy Poppy. No way.
I wrote it complete from the beginning. The lyrics on the other side of the paper were the ones that Tossen discarded. It was the reference to the Virginia Tech shootings, the threat of a mass killing. When Tossen decided to move back to campus sometime later he threw all his notebooks and paper and clothes into his car to move them to a dorm.
One sheet of paper slept under the center console. It was the sheet police would later find in his car. Tossen says the police simply had him wrong. He wasn't a terrorist in the making.
He was a student, a musician, a budding entrepreneur. He left his car on a campus side road for a simple reason. He'd run out of gas. He says he was going to get more fuel when he got paid at the end of the week.
And that loaded gun in his dorm? Tossen agrees he shouldn't have had the gun in campus housing. But he insists it was an innocent mistake. He'd legally registered the weapon and thought that that made it okay to have it with him on campus.
Both Tossen and his friend Thomas say owning guns was not unusual in their part of the Midwest. It just wasn't a big deal. One of the things that I kind of want to make sure that everybody's clear on is that down in Southern Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri and all that, there was a pretty big gun culture.
So when we moved off campus, one of the things that he mentioned that he wanted to do and that we both ended up doing was applying for our boycotts, the firearm identification that Illinois has, you get to get an ID to own or carry a firearm. Thomas and Tossen votes say they had no idea the police were poking around. So when the cops burst into their dorm and arrested Tossen, it came as a complete surprise. So as far as in my mind, I'm thinking okay, maybe I have a warrant for a ticket or I really didn't know what was going on.
And so I asked them some times that hey, can I call my dad? Like I'm gonna call my dad just to let him know what's going on. Can I call my older brother? And they wouldn't let me make any phone calls.
He says it wasn't until a couple of days later, when Thomas came to visit that he actually began to understand what was going on. So I picked up the phone and was talking to the glass. And the first thing he asked me was like how am I? I said I'm fine, I just want to figure out what's going on.
And then that's when he says do you remember that night when we were writing and producing and you wrote the thing about the PayPal account and the thing we got from the Law & Order episode and I was like yeah, and then he says that's what this is about. And so when he said that twice he said that's what this is about. Tossen worried they thought he was a terrorist and then came to charge for attempted terrorist threat. I never heard of a charge like that before.
You know attempted terrorist threat. Not a terrorist threat. Still, Tossen was sure the confusion would soon be cleared up. So my dad gets here with our lawyer, we'll be able to explain this and you know and that'll be the end of it.
They made a mistake and we can go back to our lives. But when the story hit the news, Tossen says everything got warped. They were saying a Nigerian citizen, a Uto-snow-duale and making a scene like I was like a foreigner that like came over here. It's just the way I was being portrayed as if I was a terrorist and of course my name was mispronounced on purpose to make it sound really really foreign and just different.
And they were not describing me like I was a kid born and raised in Sanguisan. The news media kept harping on the note. They distorted it, Tossen says. And so yes, when you now paint it that way as a note and violence and guns it's very easy to make anybody feel like oh yeah this was one bad guy because you can craft information and make something appear the way you want to if you have the upper hand.
Tossen says no one in law enforcement wanted to hear his side of the story. Thomas Phillips felt the same. After police initially talked to Tossen, he tried to go back to them and explain that they had it all wrong. It's a shame that I can actually tell somebody like a law enforcement official after the initial interview.
This is what actually has happened because y'all had this to the story and that no one's going to hear it because everybody's minds already made up with what actually appears to be the case. Why did that happen? There were lots of issues. Race, culture, the fear of mass shooting and there was the music.
After we ran the analysis we found that in every dimension, rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country. Stay with us. At DID Electrical, we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting. A fridge with more space?
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The man was Tohyen Odewole, Toesen's father. Tohyen was unruffled and extremely poised and dignified. Toesen's father wanted Jeffrey to take on his son's case. He was intrigued and agreed.
Jeffrey drove 5 hours south to see Toesen at the Madison County Jail. It was a contact visit because I was an attorney and that was our first meeting. He was shackled at the ankles and handcuffed at his wrists and he was a quiet young guy, great eye contact. Not particularly frightened like so many people are in that situation.
In light of the Virginia Tech massacre Jeffrey says he understood why police suspected Toesen. But he says they should have quickly figured out that they were off track. Once you did your investigation you should have known that you were off on a Fool's errand. You should have known and it wouldn't have taken too much effort to realize that he was not plotting or planning some kind of massacre.
You could have realized and seen very readily that these were lyrics. In fact there were lyrics on the opposite side if I recall that note on both sides. And I believe that there were lyrics throughout the car and his apartment when they searched it they found notebooks with hundreds of pages of rap lyrics. Investigators were unable to find evidence that Toesen had a violent side.
Teachers and students maintained he wasn't threatening but the prosecution disagreed. State's attorney Tom Gibbon says despite Toesen's insistence that what was on the paper were lyrics he remained certain that they were not. I probably read at least a thousand pages of his writing to get to know the mind of Bull the Toesen O'Dowalie and to understand the difference between the types of writings that he did. And so you know having and after reviewing all that spending a lot of time looking at it mostly in my free time at night I became convinced that in fact this was genuinely a crime this was an individual planning a very serious crime this was not prosecuting someone for writing lyrics this was prosecuting somebody for all of the substantial steps that he had taken toward very serious crimes and potentially a mass casualty event.
So now we have two different stories. One is a tale of a potential terrorist plotting a campus massacre. Another is a story of a young man who has unlawfully stored a gun at his university but otherwise has done little wrong. It would be up to a jury to decide which story was the truthful one and how to understand those words written on that piece of paper.
But before we head to trial I want to introduce you to one more person. My name is Sharis Kubren and I'm a professor of criminology Law and Society at the University of California Irvine. Sharis was called as an expert for the defense in Toesen's case in part because of some interesting research she's done. She was noticing a large number of prosecutions that were introducing rap lyrics in court.
She had a basic question. Our violent lyrics perceived as more threatening, more dangerous, more literal, more in need of regulation when they are described as rap compared to other music genres. This question, was intricately linked to the outcomes of criminal cases. Because prosecutors are using rap lyrics as evidence in these criminal trials, I felt this raises a whole host of questions about whether prosecutors, judges, jurors may be relying on perception and stereotype about rappers and rap music in their interpretation and evaluation of the lyrics.
So Sharis devised a study. She pulled lyrics from a 1960s folk song. We identified a set of violent lyrics. It was actually lyrics from this song Bad Man's Blunder and it's a Kingston trio folk group from the 60s and the lyrics go something like this.
Well early one evening I was rolling around, I was feeling kind of mean, I shot a deputy down. Strolling on home and I went to bed while I laid my pistol up under my head. Well early in the morning about the break of day I figured it was time to make a getaway. Stepping right along but I was stepping too slow, got surrounded by a sheriff down in Mexico.
So we took this set of violent lyrics and we told participants in our experiment that they were either rap lyrics or country music lyrics. Sharis then asked them how threatening and offensive they perceived the lyrics to be and whether they felt the lyrics should be regulated. And after we ran the analysis we found that in every dimension rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country. Sharis then replicated the study.
Again she didn't play songs for volunteers, she just printed out the lyrics from a Johnny Cash song. I'm called Boining Sue. By the way Johnny Cash gets invoked a lot because everyone knows his song I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Right and so Johnny Cash gets kind of invoked like well why can Johnny Cash say lyrics like that where he's shooting a man in Reno and there's other violence but when rappers do it it's seen as literal.
But anyway we selected these lyrics from a boy named Sue. Well I hit him hard right between the eyes and he went down but to my surprise he came up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear but I busted a chair right across his teeth and we crashed through the wall and into the street kicking in a gouging in the mud and the blood in the beer. I tell you I thought tougher men but I really can't remember when. It get like a mule any bit like a crocodile.
We found that those people who thought that those were rap lyrics were much more likely to evaluate them negatively on all those dimensions compared to those participants in our study who thought they were country. As a criminologist Sharis says, her results are troubling. I am not necessarily advocating to not find people guilty of a crime that they've committed. What I am advocating for is the use of proper techniques and proper evidence to arrive at that decision.
Right now prosecutors are relying too heavily on a form of artistic expression that is fictional that has a lot of artistic conventions knowing full well that the vast majority of jurors and judges don't really know what the artistic conventions of rap music are. The prosecutors in this sense are taking shortcuts and it's at the expense of people's lives and by the way no other form of artistic expression is treated this way in the courts because it's not as if rock musicians and heavy metal musicians and punk musicians are having their lyrics introduced as evidence against them. This is happening only for rappers and rap music. On October 18, 2011 in Madison County, Illinois, Olu-Toson Odoale's trial began.
Jeffrey O'Dagan says things went wrong from the start. Olu-Toson Odoale was a very dark skin Nigerian young man whose interest was rap and the whole defense was centered around rap. The jury was all white, overwhelmingly rural and the average age was in the 40s and 50s. So if you put that profile together a 50 year old white rural juror trying to understand our defense who none of them if I recall had ever listened with any frequency to rap music some of them did not know what it was but this was the jury that we ended up with and so that was a problem.
Tom Gibbons did not argue the case but supervised the attorneys who did. He believes they acted with care and caution. I wanted to make absolutely sure that we weren't using the authority of the state's attorney's office to prosecute somebody for their thoughts to prosecute somebody for, in this case, rap lyrics. That's not an appropriate use of the power of a prosecutor's office and the power of law enforcement.
Again, much of the attention was focused on that piece of paper that police found in Tobson's car. Tom Gibbons says the defense argued strenuously that the writing was rap lyrics. Although I have to tell you, one of his lawyers tried to rap the words in this note in trial and it was a miserable failure because these are not rap lyrics. To this comment, Tobson just shakes his head.
He admits that lyrics were not very good which is why he didn't end up using them in a song but they were still a rap. They didn't want to tell people it was rap music and they went to say it was a note so they didn't show where it rhymed, where it actually rhymed. If you don't know rap music and I just give you that sentence, where can you make it rhyme? It doesn't look like a rhyme.
If this account doesn't reach 50, 50,000, 70 days, get ready for a murderous rampage, similar to the VT shooting will occur at A-N-Ver. How he populated university and this is not a joke. So if you don't know rap music, you won't be able to piece that together. Majority of Southern Illinois Midwestern people that are 40, 50, 60 years old, prosecute as police officers, they don't know how to break down rap music or anything.
So I said, hey, that was like a small piece of rap first. We didn't even want to use it like it out of here. He's lying. After a five-day trial, the jury returned its verdict.
Guilty. States Attorney Tom Gibbons. The jury convicted Mr. O'Dowali.
They took all the evidence into account. They deliberated for, I don't recall the amount of time. I think it was a couple hours at least and they returned a verdict of guilty on both counts and he was sentenced to five years in the Department of Corrections on the attempted terrorist threat and a year in the Madison County Jail on the unauthorized possession of a weapon based on the level of the offense. Jeffrey Ordangan says the trial was a disaster.
It was a First Amendment train wreck in my view. Jeffrey sees two flaws in the prosecution's case. First, they criminalized speech. By taking a work of art, it's something that was intended as a work of art and distorted it into criminal intent.
Second, he says, they criminalized thought. By criminalizing thought, what I mean is, we need to charge this man with a crime because for all we know, he was thinking about acting on what we surmise were evil and tense, even though we have no evidence that he intended to communicate that thought. Dostin says his worst moment came after the trial at the Graham Correctional Center. They strip you naked, they take the bend over, they make sure you're not sneaking any weapons, just a very degrading process.
And then when they put me in a cell and then they lock the door and then you hear the clink and it's a small cell. It's like 5x9. There's two metal bunk beds in there into you and another guy and you just feel so claustrophobic, but you can't leave. Dostin says it felt like being punched in the gut.
Jeffrey Ordangan appealed the conviction. A year and a half later, the case came before an appellate court. The conviction for the terrorist charge was overturned. The court said, in the absence of sufficient evidence that the defendant had taken a substantial step toward making a terrorist threat, his writings as abhorrent as they might be, amount to mere thoughts.
Since Dostin's case went to trial, there have been many other cases in which wrap artists have had their lyrics introduced as evidence in criminal proceedings. Criminologist Shari Scubert. Not a lot of people know that this is happening. I don't think we quite understand the implications of using wrap lyrics as evidence and what that means for defendants.
Like can they get a fair trial? Can we ensure that their First Amendment rights are protected when these lyrics have the potential to bias jurors? When I met him at his home in New Jersey, Olutoshin Oluwale was 31 years old. He says the trial, the conviction, the prison time, he stood all of that behind him.
But one thing still upsets him. Having lyrics he considers embarrassingly bad attached to his name. There's a lot of stuff that you will never hear, that you will never see because I either didn't think it was good or I didn't think it would be received well. This was supposed to be one of those things that the world was never supposed to see or hear.
Every artist, aspiring or well established knows what it's like to try something and then toss it aside. The drawings are skewed. The photograph is blurry. The verses don't rhyme.
The cutting room floor is littered with false starts and failed attempts, but these dead ends and errors are essential to the artistic process. Dostin never ended up becoming a rap star. He's still a musician, but these days he's more focused on his career in real estate. He's still buying low and selling high.
Dostin recently co-founded a real estate hedge fund in Atlanta. He now has a bachelor's degree in business management and he's hoping to start a family one day. Some of Dostin's music did find the spotlight. People spent hours pouring over his songs, analyzing his words.
But like others before him, Dostin discovered that the artist doesn't always control how his creations are understood. Sometimes the stuff from the cutting room floor ends up being your legacy. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Rina Cohen, Jenny Schmidt and Tara Boyle. Our team includes Pat Shah, Thomas Liu, Laura Correll and Kat Shugnet.
Original music for this episode was composed by Rantina of Louis. The song Your Hearing was written and performed by Oli Tostin O'Dowali. It's called Love Me. This week we're saying goodbye to our intern, Lucia Guava.
Lucia has been a vital member of the team from the moment she arrived. She's a stellar audio producer and has helped us build an archive that we can draw on for years to come. She's going to be deeply missed. Thank you, Lucia, for all that you've brought to Hidden Brain.
Our unsung hero this week is Mary Glendening. Mary is a research librarian at NPR and she played a crucial role in tracking down information for the story. Mary and her team are fact checkers, detectives, masters of the archives, and data experts. Thank you, Mary and all the researchers at NPR for your very hard work.
For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. I'm Shankar Vedantu and this is NPR. At DID Electrical, we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting.
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