Lil Durk's murder-for-hire trial is coming up in April, and he has a major issue with some of the evidence prosecutors want to use: his own songs and videos.
In a brief filed in federal court on Friday (January 23), Durk's legal team is arguing that a dozen music videos, songs and lyric excerpts from the Chicago rapper that the government seeks to use in its case should be excluded.
That material, the brief says, "carries an extraordinary risk of unfair prejudice."
While the government's argument for the relevance of the material was filed under seal and thus is not publicly accessible, Durk's side points out that their opponents have claimed the music and visuals they want to use are "direct evidence" and "inextricably intertwined" with the charges.
Durk's attorneys claim this doesn't make sense since there is no evidence when the songs were written, or even who wrote any particular line at issue.
"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."
In addition, Durk's team claims the lyrics don't, in fact, say much of anything specific at all — that in addition to being "irrelevant" and "misleading," they simply deal with the same material as a lot of other material in the genre.
To bolster their claim, they've brought on an expert: Erik Nielson, a professor and the co-author of the 2019 book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America. In a declaration attached to Durk's brief, Nielson notes 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."
In his declaration, Nielson goes on to claim that language the government says is significant to the case, about "opps," beefs, firearms, and violence, is "common, commercial and widespread."
One additional argument Durk's side has offered up is that over time, the government has changed items on the list of musical evidence it wants to use.
"If the song was so important, they wouldn’t abandon it and replace another at each opportunity," the brief reads. "It is as if the government sifted through the hundreds of songs of the defendants and just said, 'we can make this one fit our narrative, let’s use it.'"
As an additional line of attack, the attorneys believe that because the lyrics are "objectively offensive in almost every way," they are likely to prejudice a jury — and that this is in fact what the government is hoping.
Complex reached out to Durk's lead attorney Drew Findling, who had no comment. Prosecutors have not responded to the brief as of press time.
Lil Durk is accused of ordering a hit on rap rival Quando Rondo following the death of King Von — an order Federal officials believe resulted in the death of Rondo's cousin Saviay’a Robinson, who was shot and killed in Los Angeles in 2022.