From K-QED. One of the biggest stories in hip-hop right now is set to play out in a courtroom later this year.

Rapper Young Thog will appear in court this morning. The rapper whose real name is Jeffrey Williams Jr. was

arrested Monday on 56 count racketeering indictment.

Atlanta rapper Young Thug is on trial for charges that include conspiracy, assault, and participation in a criminal gang.

And one of the key pieces of evidence is his music.

Prosecutors reference several of young-thug songs in their indictment and will present some of his lyrics as evidence.

Nine of Young Thug songs used as evidence with lyrics such as,

I never killed anybody but I got something to do with that body and I killed his man in front of his mama.

I never killed anybody but I got some to do with that body.

The use of rap lyrics in criminal trials has increased dramatically since the late 2000s,

but it dates back to the 1990s, and some people say it might have started in the San Francisco

Bay Area during the trial of one of the region's most

famous rappers Mac Dre.

I'm in the building and I'm feeling myself.

Mac Dre is best known for pioneering Heifie, the hip-hop sub-genra and cultural movement that thrust

the Bay Area into the national spotlight.

You can't go to a Golden State Warriors game without hearing

his song Feeling Myself blasted over a sea of dancing fans.

But long before that, when Mac Dre was barely out of his teens and his career as a local rapper in Vallejo was just really starting to take off, he was sentenced to five years in prison, for conspiracy to rob a bank.

Many people believe it had little to do with what he'd done, but everything to do with his rap lyrics, because some of them took aim at the police.

As part of That's My Word, K-QED's year-long project on Bay Area hip-hop,

we set out to discover what happened in the MacDray trial,

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