Sacramento — The tale of the rapper and the prosecutor is a twisted one now, bent into strange shapes by scandal, celebrity and murder music, but once it was a story of straight lines and simple roles.
When they first met in 1994, the rapper, Anerae Brown, was one of four gang members on trial for a spasm of early-morning violence that had left a grandmother dead in her home. The button-down Pete Harned was the star of the Sacramento County district attorney's office and savvy enough to know that he would win convictions if he could put the 17-year-old rapper's lurid music on trial as well.
The judge allowed Harned to play Brown's music twice in court. The music, recorded under the stage name X-Raided, was brash, explicit and relentlessly violent. In one especially damning line, Brown declared he would be "kicking down doors" and "killin' mommas." Harned argued that this was practically a prediction of the slaying of Patricia Harris. The community activist had been shot through the heart in March 1992 when gang members stormed her home searching for rivals, and police said Brown was the ringleader. When the music was played in court, Harned was confident he read victory in the jury's horror.
The trial had been a complex one with a separate jury for each of the defendants, but finally, four years after the crime and his arrest, the verdict came back guilty for X-Raided. The rapper was shuttled off to prison and, presumably, a 31-year sentence of obscurity and heartache. Harned buckled his briefcase on a key career victory and embraced Harris' relatives. The epic length of the case had left the family fuming, and they viewed Harned as their lone crusader in the legal system.
There was no reason for Harned to think he would ever see X-Raided again. But four years later, a letter with a prison postmark reconnected them in a way that would stun the Harris family if they had known.
Today, the 28-year-old Brown sits in Corcoran State Prison and fills his hours and notebooks with rhymes of gang life. His music is no idle handiwork. Despite the efforts of his jailers and the California attorney general, Brown while behind bars has managed to covertly record and release nine albums, the most recent in July. The modest sales make him unknown to most music fans, but X-Raided is an underground hero to some and a celebrity of the prison yard. "The music," he says, "takes me over these walls."
