The Shaggy Defense: How a reggae song became a legal strategy
Chewbacca. Twinkies. The Matrix. King Kong. Dead Cat. Affluenza. Those of you who can spot the Victoria Coren Mitchell impression I’m doing might be able to see the connection between all these seemingly random statements. Or you’ve looked at the headline and know that we’re talking about legal defenses here.
Despite my attempts at building mystery and intrigue falling apart like all my hopes and dreams, there is a point to be made here, shockingly enough. The point is that, despite the world of the law being (understandably) a completely po-faced, deadly serious one, the problem is that the world of the law (also understandably) contains a whole lot of utterly desperate people. Utterly desperate people who will try anything to avoid justice.
Thus, you get legal defense that are total mockeries of the justice system, put forth to the jury in the bloody-minded hope that it’ll convince them that you’re innocent. Or at the very least not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. What’s more, a lot of them worked. The Twinkie defense, for example, comes from the legendary miscarriage of justice that saw Dan White serve five years in prison rather than life for murdering Harvey Milk and George Moscone in a homophobic hate crime.
The defense? He was depressed and eating too much junk food like Twinkies, so he wasn’t in a rational state of mind.
I mean, let’s be real here, that defense worked because White killed a gay man in 1978, and the jury probably thought Milk deserved it. However, once a defense has legal precedent, all bets are off. Anything is worth building a case around on the off-chance you’ll get lucky. Even if it’s a legal defense as simply as saying, in the immortal words of Shaggy himself, “It wasn’t me”/ Unsurprisingly, many people have tried using this defense in court.
Also unsurprisingly, the context of these legal trials is a lot less funny than it seems on the surface.
When was the first “Shaggy Defense” in legal history?
Shaggy’s monster hit came out in 2000. As we all know, the song depicts, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, a young man going to a friend for advice after his girlfriend caught him cheating. The friend’s advice is for Shaggy to quite simply deny everything and respond to every accusation with “it wasn’t me”, even if said girlfriend saw it with her own eyes. Just front it out, and everything will work out for the best, so it seems.
Two years after Shaggy’s hit took the world by storm, a truly harrowing story broke about someone who was an even bigger musical megastar than him. R Kelly was caught on tape raping an underage girl and urinating on her, with the tape sent to the Chicago Sun-Times on the very same day that Kelly was due to perform at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kelly pleaded Not Guilty, stating that the man in the video hadn’t him and, long story short, it worked.
This is obviously a simplified version of the story. The case itself was pockmarked with Kelly and his team (and this is a grimly fitting way of putting it) perverting the course of justice. Key witnesses don’t turn up to testify. Other witnesses were caught accepting bribes, and eventually, five years after Kelly was originally arrested, he was acquitted on all charges.
I wonder if other powerful people would have the sheer gall to barefacedly deny things they’re clearly guilty of because they know they’ll get away with it? Wouldn’t want to live in that world if that’s the case.