Not long after Lil Durk’s legal team pushed back against prosecutors using his music as evidence in his murder-for-hire case, the prosecution responded by insisting the rapper’s work should be allowed in court.
According to court filings, prosecutors rejected Durk’s arguments and laid out plans to introduce his songs, lyrics, and music videos—along with some created by members of his crew—as part of their evidence. They say they’ve compiled nine music videos and three audio recordings that they believe are relevant to the trial.
The case revolves around an ongoing feud between Durk and Quando Rondo. King Von, who was signed to Durk’s OTF label, was killed during a 2020 confrontation involving Rondo’s circle. Prosecutors allege that Durk later placed a bounty on Rondo, which they say led to a 2022 shooting in Los Angeles that resulted in the death of Rondo’s cousin, Saviay’a Robinson.
Among the lyrics prosecutors are focusing on are lines where Durk references feeling pressure to retaliate for Von’s death. This includes lyrics from “All My Life” featuring J. Cole: “They be on my page like ‘Slide for Von’, I know they trollin me . . . Got it back in blood, y’all just don’t know, that’s how it ‘posed to be.” Prosecutors argue that these and other lyrics amount to admissions that Durk and OTF “had motive for seeking revenge for [Von’s] death and to kill [Quando Rondo].”
They also claim some songs suggest Durk “was the leader of OTF who funded his co-conspirators’ violence against rivals, including by placing bounties.”
One example cited is lyrics from an unreleased track found on a co-defendant’s phone titled “Scoom His Ass,” which includes the lines: “Popping traffic, we in Cali’, ride through Beverly Hills with choppers . . . Bounty hunter.”
The shooting that killed Robinson occurred roughly a mile and a half from Beverly Hills, in Los Angeles’ Beverly Grove area. In a separate filing last year, prosecutors said the lyrics from “Scoom His Ass” bore a “striking similarity” to the circumstances of the killing.
The prosecution argued that courts have previously allowed art—especially music—to be used as evidence in conspiracy and gang-related cases. They added that blocking Durk’s lyrics would “diminish the jury’s role to weigh defendants’ own words.” Prosecutors are asking the court to reject Durk’s motion and allow the excerpts to be presented at trial.
Last month, Durk’s attorneys filed a motion seeking to exclude his music from evidence, arguing it poses an “extraordinary risk of unfair prejudice.” They said the government’s claim that the music is “inextricably intertwined” with the case is flawed, pointing out that there’s no proof showing when the songs were written or who actually wrote the lyrics.
“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 filing states. “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.”
To support their argument, Durk’s team enlisted professor and author Erik Nielson, who co-wrote the 2019 book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America. Nielson noted 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.”
