Lil Durk’s family has released a statement about “false evidence”—his own lyrics—being used against him in his murder-for-hire case.
“The recent developments in Durk’s legal case have brought a harsh truth to light: the government presented false evidence to a grand jury to indict him,” the statement, issued on Tuesday (April 29), reads. “This isn’t justice. That’s a violation of the very system that’s supposed to protect all of us.”
“Durk has always used music to tell stories, to express pain to heal—and yet those same lyrics are now being used against him,” the statement continues. “We refuse to stay silent as Black artists continue to be criminalized for their creativity. Rap is art.”
The statement ends with Durk’s family requesting the public to support him in this fight.
“As a family, we are asking the public, the fans, and the culture to stand with us. Stand for truth,” it reads. “Stand for fairness. Stand for The Voice.”
Durk’s attorneys are currently trying to get his murder-for-hire charges dismissed, or at the very least get the Chicago rapper out on bail, with a claim that his detention is due to a misuse of his lyrics.
Durk is accused of murder-for-hire. The rapper allegedly placed a bounty on Quando Rondo, with whom prosecutors claim he was feuding. Feds say that bounty led OTF affiliates to commit a shooting in Los Angeles, with Rondo as the intended target, that ultimately killed his cousin Saviay’a Robinson.
On April 18, Durk’s legal team filed multiple motions claiming that prosecutors wrongly used a section of the rapper’s collab with Babyface Ray, “Wonderful Wayne and Jackie Boy,” as evidence that the rapper aimed to commercialize Robinson’s killing. This is the “false evidence” mentioned in Tuesday’s statement.
Durk’s objections were twofold. First, he said that the lyrics to “Wonderful Wayne and Jackie Boy” were written many months before Robinson was killed, so he could not have been discussing it in his verse.
Second, Durk’s lawyers claimed that the rapper didn’t have anything to do with the version of the song that the feds referenced, which contained footage from Robinson’s murder.
“The internet users who posted the videos…are apparent ‘fan pages’ maintained by people with no affiliation to Mr. Banks or Only the Family, Inc,” they wrote in a filing. “It is unfair, misleading, and just flat-out wrong for the government to suggest that Mr. Banks is responsible for these video/audio edits or that they evidence his purported commercialization of a murder that he supposedly ordered.”
In the government’s response to Durk’s motion, filed on Monday (April 28), they mentioned lyrics from several other songs, including the unreleased track “Scoom His Ass.” That song, prosecutors said, contained lyrics that “have a striking similarity to the modus operandi used to kill [Robinson].”
Durk is set to have a hearing on May 8 to determine if he can be released from jail ahead of his trial. Until then, he’s helping to convert other people behind bars to Islam, according to his father, Dontay “Big Durk” Banks.
