The jury did not buy the government’s case. After three days of deliberations in U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald’s courtroom, Lil Durk walked out of federal court on Friday acquitted of every single charge against him.
The case centered on a federal murder-for-hire conspiracy tied to the 2021 death of Saviay’a Robinson, known as Lul Pab, and an alleged plot to kill Tyquian Bowman, better known as Quando Rondo.
Prosecutors argued Durk financed the operation as revenge for the killing of his close friend and labelmate Dayvon Bennett, King Von, who was shot outside an Atlanta nightclub on November 6, 2020, following a confrontation with Quando Rondo’s crew.
The Justice Department’s theory was that Durk’s grief over losing King Von turned into something far more calculated and deadly over the years that followed.
Five charges were brought against Durk, including conspiracy to commit stalking, stalking Quando Rondo with a dangerous weapon, and stalking Robinson in a way that resulted in her death, alongside two counts tied to using interstate facilities in a murder-for-hire scheme.
The jury cleared Durk on all of them. That is not a partial win or a technicality, that is a full acquittal across the board.
Co-defendants Deandre Wilson, known as DeDe, and David Lindsey, known as Browneyez, had a more complicated outcome. The jury convicted both men on stalking and stalking conspiracy charges, but found them not guilty on the murder-for-hire counts, which were the most serious charges they faced.
That split verdict is worth sitting with for a moment. The jury essentially said that Wilson and Lindsey did stalk Quando Rondo, but stopped short of finding that a paid murder plot was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. For the government, which built a high-profile case framing this as an organized, financed operation, that is a significant blow.
Durk’s legal team had maintained throughout the trial that the prosecution was reaching, trying to connect a grieving artist to crimes he did not direct or fund.
The not guilty verdict on every count suggests at least twelve jurors agreed that the evidence did not hold up to that standard.
For Quando Rondo, who was the intended target at the center of this case, the outcome is complicated in a different way.
The men tied to the stalking were convicted on those counts, but the broader murder-for-hire conspiracy that allegedly put his life in danger was not proven in court, at least not against the man prosecutors called the financier.
The case drew enormous attention in rap circles partly because of who it involved and partly because of what it represented, a federal government using murder-for-hire statutes to reach into rap beef and hold artists financially accountable for street violence connected to their world. That approach did not succeed here, at least not against Durk.
Sentencing for Wilson and Lindsey on their stalking convictions has not yet been scheduled.
