Shortly after Lil Durk’s legal team argued against the use of the rapper’s art as evidence in his murder-for-hire trial, prosecutors responded by firing back that his music should, in fact, be considered evidence.
In court documents reviewed by Complex, prosecutors responded to Durk’s arguments. They outlined plans to use the rapper’s music, lyrics, and music videos, as well as some by his crew, as evidence in hs trial. Specifically, they’ve gathered nine music videos and three audio files, which they argued are all relevant to the case.
The case centers around a beef between Durk and Quando Rondo. King Von, who was signed to OTF, was killed in a 2020 altercation with Rondo’s camp. Prosecutors say Durk subsequently put out a bounty on Rondo, which led to a 2022 shooting in Los Angeles that killed Rondo’s cousin, Saviay’a Robinson.
Among the lyrics at issue are several that deal with pressure Durk raps about feeling to retaliate for Von’s killing, including the well-known lines from “All My Life” featuring J. Cole: “They be on my page like ‘Slide for Von’, I know they trollin me . . . Got it back in blood, y’all just don’t know, that’s how it ‘posed to be.” Prosecutors say those lyrics and a few others are admissions that Durk and OTF “had motive for seeking revenge for [Von’s] death and to kill [Quando Rondo].”
Prosecutors also claim that a few songs contain lyrics showing that Durk “was the leader of OTF who funded his co-conspirators’ violence against rivals, including by placing bounties.”
Among the examples cited are lyrics from an unreleased song seized from a co-defendant’s cell phone called “Scoom His Ass”: “Popping traffic, we in Cali’, ride through Beverly Hills with choppers . . . Bounty hunter.”
The shooting that killed Robinson took place about a mile and a half from Beverly Hills, in L.A.’s Beverly Grove neighborhood. In a separate legal filing from last year, the government said the “Scoom His Ass” lyrics had a “striking similarity” to the Robinson incident.
The filing argues that previous conspiracy and gang cases have used art, music in particular, as evidence. Prosecutors claim that if Durk’s lyrics are prohibited from being presented, it “diminishes the jury’s role to weigh defendants’ own words.” The prosecution has requested that the court deny the motion from Durk’s legal team and rule that the excerpts can be admitted as evidence.
Last month, the Chicago rapper’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss the use of his art as evidence because it “carries an extraordinary risk of unfair prejudice.” His attorneys said that the government’s claim that his music is “inextricably intertwined” doesn’t make sense because there’s no evidence of when the songs were written or who was responsible for writing the lyrics.
"The notices [of which musical evidence is being used] do not identify who authored the lyrics, when they were created, whether the defendants adopted them, or how the government connects each specific excerpt to any particular fact in dispute," the brief reads. “Without this basic information, the Court cannot determine whether the music evidence is temporally connected to the charged conspiracy or 'too temporally distant' to qualify as part of the same transaction.”
To back up their motion, they brought on professor and author Erik Nielson, who co-authored the 2019 book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America. Nielson noted that “the proposed evidence is of similar type, content, and substance as a large percentage of music produced by other artists in the same genre as the defendants."