Lil Durk (born Durk Banks) is pushing to have his murder-for-hire indictment dismissed.
ABC7 Chicago reported the Deep Thoughts rapper’s legal team accused prosecutors of giving the grand jury “false evidence” when using lyrics from 2022’s “Wonderful Wayne & Jackie Boy” that allegedly confirm Banks boasted about the fatal attack.
“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,” Durk’s lawyer Drew Findling wrote in the filing filed on Friday (April 18), per Billboard. “That claim is demonstrably false.” He added that the lyrics were written “seven months before the incident even happened.”
Banks was charged with ordering the hit of rival Quando Rondo (born Tyquian Bowman). It resulted in the death of Lul Pab (born Saviay’a Robinson).
Findling continued, “A prosecutor who knowingly secures an indictment based upon false information, or who allows a falsely obtained indictment to persist, routs the grand jury from its central protective function. That is clearly what happened here.”
The record in question reportedly makes a direct reference to a news clip filmed shortly after the shooting, but the drill rapper’s attorneys said those edits didn’t use audio from the original broadcast and that Banks has no affiliation to those who doctored the video clips.
In a federal criminal complaint filed last year in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Banks was also allegedly faulted for spearheading Only The Family (OTF), a Chicago-based rap collective “that acts as a group of individuals who engage in violence, including murder and assault, at [his] direction.”
“Banks put a monetary bounty out for an individual with whom Banks was feuding named T.B.,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment, referring to Rondo by his initials. “Banks ordered T.B.’s murder and the hitmen used Banks and OTF-related finances to carry out the murder.”
Several members of Only The Family allegedly used two vehicles to “track, stalk and attempt to murder T.B. at a gas station located in Los Angeles” on Aug. 19, 2022, per the filing. The alleged hit was carried out in retaliation for the 2020 killing of rapper King Von (Dayvon Bennett), Banks’ close friend.
Banks was one of six co-conspirators charged with murder, murder-for-hire, and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire resulting in death.
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