Music News

Federal prosecutors have unveiled a new indictment against Lil Durk in his murder-for-hire case — only this time, they’ve dropped all reference to lyrics that the star’s lawyers had claimed were being unfairly weaponized against him.

The new “superseding” indictment, released Friday (May 2), came six months after prosecutors first charged the Chicago drill star (Durk Banks) with murder-for-hire, accusing him of ordering members of his Only the Family (OTF) crew to carry out a 2022 attack on rival rapper Quando Rondo that left another man dead.

Though it added a new charge of stalking, Friday’s new indictment is most notable for what it removed: Any mention of Durk’s lyrics. Last month, his lawyers argued that the cited song was clearly unrelated to the shooting and had been unfairly used against him; in a social media post Wednesday (April 30), Durk’s family said he was the latest rapper to be “criminalized for their creativity.”

In separate court filings on Friday, prosecutors acknowledged removing Durk’s lyrics from the new indictment, but said the move would not weaken the case against him.

“Defendant Banks has presented a false narrative that he is being prosecuted and detained because of his violent lyrics. This claim is, and has always been, baseless,” prosecutors write. “Just like every iteration of the indictment before it, the [new indictment] contains significant allegations that show defendant’s alleged role in the execution-style murder of [the victim] on a busy street corner in Los Angeles.”

Durk’s attorney, Drew Findling, filed his own response to the new indictment in court Friday, arguing that “it appears that the government has conceded” the “hotly contested” dispute over the lyrics. He also noted that prosecutors had deleted another passage from the indictment that directly accused one of Durk’s co-defendants of paying a bounty at Durk’s direction.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles declined to comment on the new indictment. Findling did not immediately return a request for comment.

Durk was arrested in October on murder-for-hire and gun charges related to the September 2022 shooting at a Los Angeles gas station, which left Rondo (Tyquian Bowman) unscathed but saw his friend Lul Pab (Saviay’a Robinson) killed in the crossfire.

In court filings, prosecutors have argued that Durk’s OTF crew was not merely a well-publicized group of Chicago rappers, but a “hybrid organization” that also functioned as a criminal gang to carry out violent acts at his behest. One of them was the Rondo attack, the feds say, allegedly carried out in retaliation for the 2020 killing of rapper King Von (Dayvon Bennett), a close friend of Durk’s.

To back up that claim, prosecutors quoted lyrics from a song called “Wonderful Wayne & Jackie Boy” that allegedly referenced the shooting. They claimed Durk “sought to commercialize” Lul Pub’s death by “rapping about his revenge” on Rondo: “Told me they got an addy (go, go)/ Got location (go, go)/ Green light (go, go, go, go, go),” Durk raps in the track. “Look on the news and see your son/You screamin’, “No, no” (pu–y).”

The use of rap music as evidence in criminal cases is controversial, as critics argue it threatens free speech and can sway juries by tapping into racial biases. Over the past few years, the practice has drawn backlash from the music industry and led to efforts by lawmakers to stop it. But it has continued largely unabated, most notably in the recent criminal case against Young Thug in Atlanta.

Last month, Durk’s lawyers sharply pushed back — arguing that “Wonderful Wayne” could not have referenced the Rondo shooting because the rapper wrote and recorded his verses “seven months before the incident even happened.” Mockingly asking if the government was prosecuting Durk “on a theory of extra-sensory prescience,” the star’s lawyers called the lyric allegations “false evidence” that had been unfairly used to indict him and to deny him pre-trial release.

Ahead of Friday’s new indictment that dropped the lyrics, prosecutors had strongly defended their use of Durk’s music. In a court filing earlier this week, the feds said he was not being prosecuted “because of his lyrics,” but suggested they might still be cited as evidence in the case.

“Defendant has repeatedly used his pulpit as a voice of violence, publicly rapped about paying for murders, hunting opponents with machineguns, ‘bounty hunters’ in Beverly Hills — and other lyrics that have a striking similarity to the modus operandi used to kill S.R.,” the government wrote. “It’s true that words have power, and that defendant’s words about ‘green lighting’ violence and placing bounties may be admissions of criminal conduct. That is for a jury to decide.”