Courts and Crime
"I’m here to make sure both sides have a fair trial," the judge says at a tense hearing
Lil Durk won a significant court victory Tuesday when a federal judge agreed to separate newly filed racketeering charges from his upcoming trial over allegations he ordered a killing that resulted in an August 2022 murder in Los Angeles.
In a brief ruling issued after a tense hearing, the judge said that a separate January 2022 killing in Chicago and an alleged February 2019 attempted murder in Atlanta would be off-limits at Durk’s Aug. 20 trial in downtown Los Angeles because prosecutors introduced them only last month, in a third superseding indictment. The judge said the related new counts — alleging violent crimes in aid of racketeering activity and firearms possession in furtherance of murder in aid of racketeering — would be severed for a subsequent trial.
“It has been and remains the court’s intention that the Los Angeles trial will include all admissible evidence that is not unduly prejudicial,” U.S. District Court Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald wrote in his decision obtained by Rolling Stone. He said prosecutors “chose to withdraw evidence of the ‘Chicago incident'” from the Los Angeles trial earlier in the case, and they would have to live with that decision now that Banks and his lawyers spent so much time preparing their defense accordingly.
