Lil Durk was acquitted Friday on all five federal counts. The attorney who argued him out of a life sentence got into that courtroom because another rapper picked up the phone.
A federal jury in downtown Los Angeles acquitted Durk Devontay Banks on all five counts Friday afternoon.
Conspiracy to commit stalking. Stalking resulting in death. Murder for hire. Seven women and five men took three days to come back on a two week trial, and when the verdict was read, one of his attorneys, Christy O'Connor, linked arms with him to hold him up while he broke down.
He was facing life.
Now here is the part most of the coverage is going to skip, so we are putting it up top. Durk did not go home Friday. He has been in federal custody since October 24, 2024, and that includes a stretch of nearly five months in segregated housing. His team offered three point three million dollars in cash and property for bond and got told no. He is still in a cell tonight, waiting on a second trial the government split off from this one.
Not guilty on all five. Still inside. Both of those are true at the same time.
Anybody telling you he walked out of that building Friday is telling you a story.
The reason we are writing this piece is the man who argued the case.
Brian Steel is not a stranger to anybody who followed the YSL trial in Atlanta. He was Young Thug's lead counsel through the longest criminal trial in Georgia history. Thug sat in custody from May 2022 until October 2024 and walked out of that courthouse on fifteen years of probation and time served. Somewhere in the middle of it, Steel got held in contempt for refusing to tell a judge how he had learned about a private meeting between that judge, prosecutors, and a witness. He chose the contempt. Georgia's Supreme Court threw the ruling out, unanimously.
That is the lawyer. And here is how he ended up on Durk's case.
Young Thug sent him.
Thug said it himself, publicly, on X. He wrote that he put Steel on it on his own dime. When people ran with the money part, he came back and clarified what actually mattered. He said he connected his brother to his longtime attorney, and that if he had not vouched, "my lawyer wouldn't have even took the case." His words.
I sent Brian to get with him and take the case.
Steel is not licensed in California. He had to file for special admission just to stand up in that courtroom, and he filed it back in March.
Sit with the shape of that. One rapper comes out of two and a half years in a cell, in a case built on his own lyrics, and the first thing he does with the lawyer who got him out is hand him to the next man facing the same machine. Nobody had to report on it for it to count. Nobody needed a camera. That is a phone call between two people who understand exactly what the other one is sitting in.
The government's case leaned on cooperating witnesses. Steel and Drew Findling, whose client list already runs through Cardi B, Gucci Mane, Offset and a former president, went straight at them, calling them admitted killers trading somebody else's life for a break on their own.
Steel's sharpest move was not an argument. It was a recording. He took the government's star witness, OTF Jam, and played back the man's own earlier interviews with law enforcement, the ones where he told them Durk was not involved. Then he let the jury do the math on which version showed up after a deal was on the table.
In closing, Steel kept it to something a jury could carry back into the room with them. He told them that if they had one single reason to doubt Durk was involved, the verdict was not guilty. Then he said the four words plain.
Durk Banks is not guilty.
Durk never took the stand. Neither did Quando Rondo.
And Marissa Goldberg, also on that defense team, said the thing this publication has been saying for years, in front of a federal jury, about the government's reading of the music.
This is art. This is performance.
That is the whole fight. That has been the whole fight since they started walking rap lyrics into courtrooms and calling them confessions. A jury in Los Angeles just heard it framed that way and came back not guilty on five counts.
A man died in that parking lot.
Saviay'a Robinson was twenty four years old. His people called him Lul Pab. He was in the passenger seat of a black Escalade in Los Angeles in August of 2022 and he is not here, and no verdict on Friday changed that or was ever going to. A jury said the government did not prove Durk Banks was responsible for it. A jury did not say that family's loss was smaller than it is.
Both of those are allowed to be true, and a publication that only tells you the first one is not telling you the truth.
In June, two months out from trial, prosecutors filed a third superseding indictment and added racketeering charges, alleging Durk ran something they named the Banks Gang Enterprise. The defense moved to split those off, and Judge Michael Fitzgerald granted it. He also told the lead prosecutor it was obvious the government wanted the Chicago count tried alongside the Los Angeles murder because they liked their chances better that way.
A federal judge said that out loud, on the record, about the people bringing the case.
Those charges are still live. That trial is set to begin October 5. Durk sits until then.
So no, this is not over. But Friday, in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles, a defense team that exists because one rapper made a call for another one took five counts off a man who was looking at the rest of his life.
For the culture.
Q Ward is the founding editorial lead of Hip Hop Weekly.