Lil Durk Beats All Five Charges, and Hip-Hop’s Biggest Names Don’t Hold Back

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A federal jury cleared the Chicago rapper of every count in his murder-for-hire trial on Friday, though he isn’t leaving custody just yet.

A federal jury in Los Angeles returned a verdict on Friday, September 11, finding Lil Durk not guilty on all five charges in his murder-for-hire trial. The panel deliberated for three days, beginning Wednesday, before reaching its decision. Durk, whose legal name is Durk Devontay Banks, faced conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, use of interstate facilities to commit murder-for-hire resulting in death, conspiracy to commit interstate stalking, interstate stalking involving a dangerous weapon, and interstate stalking resulting in death. The jury acquitted him of every one. His two co-defendants, Deandre “OTF DeDe” Wilson and David “Browneyez” Lindsay, were convicted on the stalking and stalking-conspiracy counts but acquitted of the murder-for-hire charges, a split verdict that separated their culpability from Durk’s.

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Durk, 33, reportedly wiped away tears in the courtroom, dressed in a tan suit, as his family and supporters erupted around him. Outside the downtown courthouse, a crowd of fans and content creators had gathered to wait on the news. Durk, who grew up in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood and won a Grammy for Best Melodic Rap Performance in 2024 for “All My Life,” has built Only the Family into one of the city’s most visible rap exports over the past decade, which is part of why a Los Angeles courtroom’s decision carried weight well beyond it. Defense attorney Drew Findling, who represented Durk alongside Brian Steel, framed the outcome in personal terms after the verdict: “Twenty-two months ago, Durk and I made an agreement that we would make history with the greatest verdict in this country, and it happened today.” He added that “the shackles must come off” so Durk “can come home to his beautiful family and to the world that loves him.” Independent court journalist Meghann Cuniff, who had covered the trial gavel to gavel, reported the acquittal and, in the same breath, the detail that mattered most for what happens next: Durk isn’t going anywhere yet.

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The case federal prosecutors built stretched back to 2020. That year, Dayvon “King Von” Bennett, a rapper on Durk’s Only the Family label and one of his closest collaborators, was shot and killed outside an Atlanta nightclub during a confrontation involving associates of rapper Tyquian “Quando Rondo” Bowman. A man identified as Lul Tim was charged in Von’s killing; those charges were later dropped under Georgia’s stand-your-ground self-defense law. Prosecutors alleged that Durk never let the killing go, and that in August 2022 he set a revenge plot in motion, offering money and, per the indictment, “lucrative music opportunities” to associates in exchange for killing Bowman.
The plan, as prosecutors described it to the jury, went wrong. A group of men prosecutors say Durk enlisted followed Bowman around Los Angeles and opened fire near a gas station by the Beverly Center, spraying roughly 18 rounds at his black Escalade. Bowman wasn’t hit. His cousin, Saviay’a “Lul Pab” Robinson, was, and died at the scene. Durk was arrested more than two years later, in October 2024, by U.S. Marshals in Broward County, Florida, with prosecutors alleging he’d been trying to flee the country. He pleaded not guilty and was denied bond, held in Los Angeles through a trial that didn’t start until August 20, 2026, nearly two years after his arrest.

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At trial, prosecutors leaned on testimony from people inside Durk’s own circle. Kavon Grant, described as a former assistant, along with a witness named Jones and rapper “OTF Jam” (born Kacey Hester), all testified against him. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ian Yanniello argued in closing that Durk “had his shooters on speed dial.” Durk’s defense offered a different account entirely, that it was Grant who arranged the hit on his own, allegedly hoping to impress his boss, not Durk who ordered it. The jury believed the defense’s version, or at least didn’t believe the prosecution had proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt, on all five counts.
The trial itself had been delayed repeatedly before it ever reached a jury. Originally scheduled for January 2025, it slipped to October 2025 and then again as both sides asked for more time to work through a discovery load that ran past 230 gigabytes of digital files and roughly 20,000 pages of reports and records, before finally opening on August 20, 2026, nearly two years after Durk’s arrest. The trial surfaced messier evidence along the way, too. A text message Durk had sent his manager, read into the record in early September, listed several people, including Bowman, rapper NBA YoungBoy, and 6ix9ine, among a longer roll of names he said he “hated” and had “something against.” Prosecutors pointed to it as evidence of Durk’s state of mind toward Bowman specifically. The defense didn’t dispute that the message existed, only that a list of grievances wasn’t proof of a murder conspiracy, a distinction the jury ultimately accepted.
The rivalry behind the case wasn’t new, either. Durk and King Von had their own run-in with the law tied to Bowman’s circle back in 2019, when the two were accused of robbing $30,000 in cash from a man named Alexander Weatherspoon outside an Atlanta restaurant. Durk faced an attempted murder charge over that incident, which prosecutors ultimately dropped.

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Word of the verdict spread across social media within minutes, and Durk’s circle didn’t stay quiet. Ye was among the first to post, writing on X, “Lil Durk is not guilty on ALL COUNTS,” a message he followed by reposting further coverage of the acquittal. Drake kept his response simple, sharing a photo of himself with Durk to his Instagram Story rather than writing anything out. 21 Savage did much the same, posting his own photo with Durk. G Herbo shared an excited reaction to his own Instagram Story, and Doe Boy posted video celebrating the news, both part of a wider wave of Durk’s peers who had followed the trial as deliberations stretched into a third day.

Meek Mill, who had publicly defended Durk throughout the proceedings, responded with a string of praying-hands emoji. Young Thug, whose own RICO case in Georgia was handled by Durk’s attorney Brian Steel, wrote just three words on X: “Thank me later.” Boosie Badazz framed the verdict as vindication of a different kind, posting, “WHEN U DONT RAT U COME BACK,” a reference to the witnesses who had testified for the prosecution. Machine Gun Kelly did more than react from a distance. Multiple outlets described him as a fixture outside the courthouse throughout the trial, helping whip the crowd of fans calling for Durk’s release into a genuine frenzy each time news broke, and he was there again when the verdict came down.

 

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Fans followed a similar script online. Instagram user @supa_cent echoed Boosie’s framing directly, writing, “All that ratting went to waste.” Another commenter, @yesimprettyvee, kept it simpler, a run of clapping-hand emoji that spread across reposts within the hour. Together with the artist reactions, it painted a single, fairly unified reaction from Durk’s corner of hip-hop: relief, and for more than a few of them, a pointed shot at the witnesses whose testimony hadn’t been enough to convict him.

Even the media coverage of the case became part of its own story. Podcaster Akademiks found himself an unexpected character in the trial itself after prosecutors played a clip from his 2023 interview with Durk during their closing argument, a strange bit of context that made Akademiks’ own live reaction to the verdict one of the more fitting responses of the day.

Quando Rondo, the rapper prosecutors said was the actual target of the 2022 shooting, kept his distance from the celebration. He’d spent the two years since Durk’s arrest signaling he wasn’t interested in reconciliation, releasing a song called “Life Goes On” days after the initial indictment that fans widely read as a tribute to his late cousin, and telling an interviewer in 2023 that he wasn’t willing to “die for” Durk the way he would for Lul Tim, the man tied to King Von’s death. He did not post publicly about Friday’s verdict.

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The acquittal closes one chapter of a legal fight that has run since Durk’s arrest, but not the whole book. In June 2026, prosecutors filed a third superseding indictment adding racketeering charges that accused Durk of running a criminal enterprise spanning California, Illinois, and Georgia, tied to a January 2022 killing in Chicago, a February 2019 attempted murder outside an Atlanta restaurant, and additional allegations involving drug trafficking, robbery, theft, and witness tampering. Durk wasn’t charged in the 2022 Chicago killing itself, but prosecutors alleged he brought $1 million in cash to a music studio afterward as what they characterized as a reward. U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald ruled in July that those newer charges were filed too close to trial to be litigated fairly alongside the original case and severed them into a separate proceeding, preserving the August court date for the murder-for-hire charges alone. That severed racketeering trial is now set to begin October 5, and Durk will remain in federal custody until it’s resolved.

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A civil case adds another layer. Andrea Laquila Robinson, Saviay’a Robinson’s mother, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Cook County Court in Chicago earlier this year, naming Durk, Only the Family, and an unnamed business manager and affiliated company. Her attorney, Warren Postman, said the family filed the suit “to hold those responsible accountable and to ensure his family receives the support they need during this difficult time.” It’s a separate action from the criminal case and doesn’t depend on Friday’s verdict, since civil suits carry a lower burden of proof than a criminal trial. It isn’t the only one, either: FBG Duck’s mother sued Durk and King Von’s estate roughly a year earlier over her son’s 2020 murder in Chicago, a case that has produced six convicted shooters but no finding of direct responsibility against either rapper. Neither civil matter is resolved by Friday’s acquittal, and both suggest the legal fallout around Durk and his label extends well past the murder-for-hire case itself.

Durk’s music career has moved forward around all of this rather than in spite of it. “Deep Thoughts,” his most recent studio album, was originally due in 2024 before his arrest pushed it to 2025; it still opened at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 on release. Whatever comes out of the October racketeering trial, Friday’s verdict was the one that mattered most in the eyes of the hip-hop world that spent three days waiting on it, and it was the one that had Durk’s peers posting within minutes of the announcement rather than waiting for a fuller legal picture to come into focus.