A juror in Lil Durk’s murder-for-hire trial opened up about how carefully the jury considered the case before reaching a not guilty verdict on all five counts against the rapper.
It has been roughly two weeks since the trial concluded on September 11. Durk had been accused of arranging an August 2022 attack targeting Quando Rondo, which resulted in the death of his cousin, Saviay’a “Lul Pab” Robinson. Content creator Ceddy Nash, who attended the three-week proceedings, spoke with an anonymous juror on his Nightly Nash web show about the jury’s deliberations and how it arrived at its decision.
Durk’s co-defendants, Deandre “OTF DeDe” Wilson and David “Browneyez” Lindsey, were convicted of stalking and conspiracy to commit stalking but acquitted on the other three charges.
“I just hope that people understand the process that went in, the how much work we put in, how proud I am of the other jurors [put in] though there were differences,” the juror said around the 2:22:00 mark.
“I ain’t going to lie, we were at each other’s throats,” they continued. “There was a lot of back and forth. It was three days of deliberation. It would have gone on to like a week more because we were that thorough.”
The juror explained that the group “went through every piece of evidence,” including footage from Durk’s 2023 interview with Akademiks, which became a point of dispute between the defense and prosecution over whether the comments were incriminating. Prosecutors argued that the Chicago rapper was admitting to Robinson’s murder as part of the “Slide for Von” movement, while Durk’s attorneys argued that his statements were too vague to establish that.
“There were about three pieces of evidence that were really important, that was the hang-up at the end. We gave the same importance to Durk as we did to DeDe and Lindsey, we gave them all a fair shot,” the juror said.
Earlier in the interview, the juror said Durk’s comments didn’t “weigh” on them and revealed that by the third day of deliberations, the jury had become so “deadlocked” that they believed the case could end in a mistrial.
In the end, Durk was found not guilty, but the Grammy winner will remain behind bars until at least early November ahead of his racketeering-related and weapons trial, which was initially set for early October.
