NOT GUILTY: Lil Durk Acquitted on All Counts in the Federal Murder-for-Hire Trial

The government had three insiders who said Durk Banks ordered the killing. It had burner phones connecting to his rented home's WiFi, and an unreleased music video it called a rehearsal for murder. On September 11, 2026, after three days of deliberations, a federal jury in Los Angeles decided it still wasn't proof beyond a reasonable doubt: Durk Banks — Lil Durk — is not guilty.

The acquittal was total. Banks was found not guilty on all five counts — the two murder-for-hire counts tied to the death of Saviay'a Robinson and the three interstate-stalking counts underneath them. His two co-defendants did not fare as well: Deandre Wilson and David Lindsey were convicted of the stalking and stalking-conspiracy charges, and acquitted of the murder-for-hire counts. Banks was the only defendant the jury cleared completely.

He had faced a mandatory life sentence had he been convicted on the death-resulting counts. Instead, after more than two weeks of testimony and a deliberation that stretched into a third day, the case the government spent years building came apart in the one room where it had to hold.

How the defense won it

The defense's theory never changed, from Marissa Goldberg's opening to the verdict: this was "a murder-for-hire allegation where nobody gets paid," built on cooperators with every reason to move blame onto the famous name at the table. Across the trial, Drew Findling, Brian Steel, and Goldberg turned the government's own witnesses into the defense's case:

• The cooperators' shifting stories. Jurors heard Kacey "OTF Jam" Hester's first recorded interview, in which he never mentioned discussing Rondo with Durk — a story the defense showed grew over roughly 30 tellings. Keith Jones admitted his first account named Grant, not Durk, as the leader — and that his memory "changed" only after an agent warned him he faced life without parole.
• The witnesses' own families. In a single rapid-fire defense day, OTF Jam's wife contradicted his account of the call that supposedly tied Durk to the trip — "it didn't happen" — and Shekema Springfield, mother of King Von's child, who had lived with cooperator Kavon Grant, called him "a liar and a thief," putting the defense's whole theory — that Grant, not Durk, drove the revenge — in the mouth of Von's own family.
• The forensics cut both ways. The defense used the FBI's own chart to show Durk had cycled through roughly 17 phone numbers since 2017 — reframing the post-shooting number change as a years-old privacy habit, not a cover-up — and noted the burner registrations the state flagged were chosen by Grant, who controlled Durk's wallet and credentials.

Banks did not testify — the near-universal choice for a defendant facing mandatory life — and kept his own words off the stand. The split verdict for his co-defendants suggests the jury drew exactly the line the defense asked it to: it was willing to convict on the stalking conduct it could tie to the men in the car, but not to pin the murder-for-hire on the man the cooperators said paid for it.

What happens now

The five counts decided at this trial are over — an acquittal cannot be appealed or retried. But this may not be the end of Banks's federal exposure: a separate set of VICAR racketeering-murder charges was severed from this case earlier in 2026 and remains pending, and Banks has been in federal custody since his October 2024 arrest. Whether he walks free now turns on the status of those severed charges and any detainers — questions for the court, not this jury. The cooperators' guilty pleas, meanwhile, stand untouched; their sentencings are still to come.

Why this case matters

Saviay'a Robinson was 24, and he was not the target — and no verdict changes that a young man was killed by shots meant for someone else. The acquittal is the mirror image of the Florida jury that convicted Mario Fernandez in under four hours on a fully circumstantial murder-for-hire case: same legal spine, opposite result. The difference the defense will point to for years is the one this jury seems to have credited — that a case resting on cooperators trading testimony for their own freedom is exactly the kind a jury can refuse to convict on when there is no direct proof of the order. For the full record of how the trial unfolded, see our complete Lil Durk trial file and the court documents behind it. Every major case date is on our court dates tracker.

Case status as of this writing: on September 11, 2026, a federal jury in the Central District of California found Durk Banks not guilty on all five counts; co-defendants Deandre Wilson and David Lindsey were convicted of the interstate-stalking and stalking-conspiracy counts and acquitted of the murder-for-hire counts. A separate VICAR racketeering matter severed from this case remains pending. This article is based on court proceedings and contemporaneous reporting by the Los Angeles Times, CBS News, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and others. Featured image: 2024 booking photograph of Durk Banks, Broward County Sheriff's Office (public domain).