Chicago drill star Lil Durk‘s lawyer filed a motion on Friday to dismiss murder-for-hire charges from 2022. His team is claiming the feds gave “false evidence” to a grand jury as they presented lyrics he wrote six months before the shooting as evidence.
Durk (born Durk Banks) was charged last year for the attempted murder of rival Quando Rondo, allegedly having ordered his own “OTF” crew to murder Rondo. While Rondo survived, his friend Lul Pab was killed in the crossfire. Durk has pleaded not guilty. The feds cited lyrics from Lil Durk’s verse on Babyface Ray’s song “Wonderful Wayne & Jackie Boy” as evidence that he was “rapping about his revenge.” The song had been released in December 2022, three months after the shooting.
“Told me they got an addy (go, go)/ Got location (go, go)/ Green light (go, go, go, go, go),” Durk raps in the song. “Look on the news and see your son/You screamin’, ‘No, no’ (pu–y).”
According to the motion filed by his lawyers, Durk recorded the song in January 2022 and cited sworn affidavits from music producers who worked on the song.
“The government told the grand jury that Mr. Banks, through specific lyrics in his music, celebrated and profited from a revenge murder that he had ordered,” David Findling, Durk’s lawyer, wrote. “That claim is demonstrably false. Unless the government is prosecuting Banks on a theory of extra-sensory prescience, the lyrics could not have soundly informed the grand jury’s finding of probable cause.”
The prosecution also claimed that his verse on the song references a news clip filmed after the shooting, where Rondo can be heard saying “No, no” after seeing Lul Pab’s body. Durk’s lawyers, however, contest this, saying that audio from the original video was not used in the original song and that these are from YouTube edits.
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“Mr. Banks did not create these videos, and the government has failed to show any nexus between these manufactured video clips and Mr. Banks,” Findling said. “The internet users who posted the videos … are apparent ‘fan pages’ maintained by people with no affiliation to Mr. Banks.”
