The jury came back Friday (Sept 11) on the third day of deliberations, and the verdict form read in Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald's downtown Los Angeles courtroom cleared Durk Banks of every count. The Chicago rapper, held without bond since October 2024, was found not guilty on all five counts tied to the August 2022 shooting near the Beverly Center that killed a 24-year-old man.

Jurors weighed conspiracy to commit stalking, stalking Tyquian "Quando Rondo" Bowman with a dangerous weapon, and stalking Saviay'a "Lul Pab" Robinson resulting in death. Two murder-for-hire counts followed, one for conspiring to use interstate facilities and one for the act itself, and conviction on the most serious carried a possible life sentence. Prosecutors had told jurors that Banks, 33, financed a years-long hunt for Bowman in retaliation for the November 2020 killing of Dayvon "King Von" Bennett. The Justice Department had built its public case on that theory since the day of his arrest.

The jury did not reject the shooting so much as the price attached to it. Deandre "DeDe" Wilson and David "Browneyez" Lindsey, the co-defendants who went to trial with Banks, were convicted of stalking and stalking conspiracy and acquitted of murder-for-hire, with sentencing to come. Twelve people watched surveillance footage of two vehicles trailing Bowman's black Escalade on August 19, 2022, agreed a pursuit had happened, and found nobody had proved the bargain underneath it.

The bounty nobody could put on paper

Federal murder-for-hire requires an agreement in which a killing is exchanged for money or another economic benefit, which means the government needed a deal and not a grudge. Keith "Flacka" Jones testified that he expected to receive as much as $1 million, though no document recorded the promise and no payment was traced. Fitzgerald had already told jurors that travel expenses alone could not establish a bounty, which took flights, hotel charges and rental records off the table as proof of a contract.

Kacey "OTF Jam" Hester supplied the other half of the payment story, telling jurors that Banks would reward whoever killed Bowman. Brian Steel, who joined the defense this summer after representing Young Thug in Atlanta's YSL prosecution, walked the jury through Hester's recorded interview with investigators. The witness first denied discussing Bowman or Timothy "Lul Tim" Leeks with Banks at all, then connected his client to a payment two hours and 18 minutes later. Steel asked the jury what had changed in that room.

Three cooperators with sentences to shorten

The government's case ran through Kavon "OTF Vonni" Grant, Hester and Jones, three men who admitted their own criminal conduct before taking the stand. Each hoped the testimony would buy him support at sentencing. Grant was the only witness who placed Banks in the role of approver and director. The defense spent the trial portraying him as a fired assistant who held his former employer's cards, passwords and travel access. A recorded call gave that argument its spine, with Grant heard saying certain things he did on his own went undetected. Drew Findling read the line back and told jurors it was the easiest pathway to reasonable doubt.

Grant had also dated the conspiracy to a gathering in the days after King Von's death. Shekema Springfield, the mother of Bennett's son, testified that she stayed with the family through that period and heard no talk of killing Bowman. Banks and several of the alleged conspirators, she said, were not there. That is the kind of contradiction the cooperating witnesses could not absorb, because the government had no independent record of the meeting to fall back on.

Investigators also left the room half-canvassed. Justin Gibson and Devonte "DJ Bandz" Richmond traveled with Banks and Grant between California and Florida while the alleged plan was in motion, and agents never questioned either man. Nobody asked what was said in the vehicles, on the plane, or at the Encino house where Banks's wife, mother-in-law, children and armed security were present. An FBI agent conceded he had relied on roughly 56 seconds of a DJ Akademiks interview without watching the remaining three and a half hours. "Nobody is interviewed. Nobody hears anything," Findling told the jury.

The lyrics went in, and again they did not convict

Fitzgerald let prosecutors use the "Pissed Me Off" video in August, after months of fighting over whether the catalog belonged in evidence at all. The government argued the record functioned as a call to arms over Von. The defense answered with Gibson, the producer, who explained how labels approve, market and profit from violent records without anyone treating a verse as a sworn statement of fact. Findling told jurors that executives and shareholders had cashed in on the same songs now being read to them as proof of conspiracy.

Two years after a Georgia prosecution turned rap lyrics into a racketeering exhibit and collapsed into plea deals, a Los Angeles jury heard the theory again and declined to convert bars into an agreement. Steel has now sat at the defense table in both. A song cannot establish who agreed to what, or when, or for what payment, and the government reached closing arguments without a witness the jury trusted to establish it either.

The questions the jury sent out

The panel's notes tracked the same gap in the proof. On Thursday morning (Sept 10) jurors asked the court to clarify Instruction No. 18, which governs conspiracy to commit stalking, and Fitzgerald reread the existing language after both sides agreed against elaborating on it. A second note asked for the definition of intent as it appears in the phrase about intending to kill, injure, harass or intimidate. The judge told jurors no specialized legal meaning applied and sent them back to the ordinary sense of the word. Bowman never appeared to describe what he had feared, an absence Findling put to them as a question about proof rather than sympathy.

What the acquittal does not settle

Banks still faces the severed racketeering counts prosecutors filed in June through a third superseding indictment, which alleges he ran a criminal enterprise the government named the Banks Gang Enterprise. Those counts tie the Bowman plot to a January 2022 killing in Chicago and a February 2019 attempted murder in Atlanta. Fitzgerald cut them loose from this trial on July 14, telling an assistant U.S. attorney that the late filing looked designed to help the government win. "You treat that as a feature, and I treat that as a bug," the judge said.

No date has been set for that second proceeding, and the government must decide whether to bring it against a defendant a jury has just cleared on the underlying conduct. Banks's lawyers have signaled they would fight it on double jeopardy grounds. Detention turns on flight risk and danger rather than on how the jury voted, and Fitzgerald has refused release before. He rejected a package offering $4.5 million, round-the-clock home detention, electronic monitoring and private security. Banks was arrested in South Florida in October 2024 while trying to board a flight to Dubai.

He was also at the commercial peak of a 15-year career. 7220 gave him his first solo No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2022 and Almost Healed opened at No. 3 the following year. Deep Thoughts, pushed from 2024 into 2025 by the arrest, also debuted at No. 3. Ye and mgk sat in the gallery on separate days. Bowman, the man prosecutors said was hunted for two years, never took the witness stand, and neither did Banks.