Lil Durk’s lawyers filed a motion demanding the new racketeering charges be split from his trial or the entire case be dismissed.
Lil Durk is fighting back against the federal government’s last-minute expansion of his case, and his lawyers are giving the court a clear choice: split the new charges off for a separate trial, or throw the whole case out.
His legal team, led by Atlanta attorneys Drew Findling and Marissa Goldberg, along with Brian Steel and Christy O’Connor, filed the motion in Los Angeles federal court.
A hearing is set for July 27. The filing lays out a stark argument: the government spent 19 months building a case around the August 2022 Beverly Hills gas station shooting that killed Lul Pab and then blew the whole thing up less than three months before trial.
Here is what actually changed.
For nearly two years, the charges against Durk centered entirely on the Los Angeles incident. That is the case where prosecutors say he ordered hitmen to travel from Chicago to California to kill Quando Rondo, a rival connected to the 2020 death of King Von.
The hitmen tracked Rondo for more than 24 hours before opening fire at a gas station near the Beverly Center. They missed Rondo and killed his cousin, Lul Pab, instead.
The defense was ready to fight those charges at trial on August 20.
Then on June 4, the government dropped a Third Superseding Indictment that added a racketeering murder charge, a conspiracy to stalk charge, and a sweeping new theory that Durk ran a multi-state criminal enterprise involving drug trafficking, robbery, theft, and witness tampering across California, Illinois, and Georgia.
Two incidents are at the center of Durk’s motion. The first is a January 2022 murder in Chicago.
Prosecutors had raised that killing earlier in the case, but then pulled it off the table in February, telling the court they would not try to use it at trial.
That move helped defeat a co-defendant’s request for a separate trial. Now that same Chicago murder is back in the indictment as a formal racketeering act.
The second is a February 2019 attempted murder outside The Varsity restaurant in Atlanta. The government had that information since the first batch of discovery in December 2024 but never once included it in any of its prior court filings.
Durk’s lawyers call the timing inexcusable.
They argue the government had all this evidence months ago and chose to wait until the eve of trial to spring it. The defense now has to review a terabyte of new discovery, investigate new witnesses across multiple states, and prepare to counter charges carrying a potential life sentence.
All of this with weeks, not months, to work.
The motion also raises a constitutional argument that goes beyond strategy.
Durk has been locked up since October 2024. He objected to every single trial delay in this case. He was overruled each time because his co-defendants needed more time.
The law says that when a defendant has been in custody for over a year waiting for trial, the delay becomes presumptively harmful to him.
Durk has now been waiting more than 21 months. His lawyers argue that if the new charges force another delay, his right to a speedy trial under the Sixth Amendment is violated, and the entire indictment must be dismissed.
The defense’s position is simple: let Durk go to trial on August 20 on the original Los Angeles charges he has spent nearly two years preparing to fight. If the government wants to pursue the new racketeering counts, do that in a separate case.
If the judge refuses and forces everything into one trial, Durk’s team says the case should be dropped on constitutional grounds.
The July 27 hearing will be one of the most important in the entire case.
