Lil Durk Jury Notes: What Did They Say?

As Lil Durk and his co-defendants wait for a verdict in the rapper's murder-for-hire trial, observers hungry for any information about what may be going through the deliberating jury's minds have been treating notes from them like Talmudic texts: going over and over the short requests, turning over different interpretations and searching for clues.

But what exactly are these jury notes, and what do they say? Complex can answer your questions.

Jury notes are exactly what they sound like: notes from the jury in a case, to the judge. They generally fall into two buckets: a request to review specific parts of testimony or exhibits; or a question for the judge about some specific aspect of the law.

Let's start with the second one first. Jury instructions — what a jury is told they need to consider in order to come up with a verdict — can be extremely involved. In Durk's case, the instructions are 56 pages long. Every word of it was either agreed to by both parties, or fought over and ultimately decided by the judge.

Some of the wording seems to favor Durk (One excerpt: "Mere presence at the scene of a crime or mere knowledge that a crime is being committed is not sufficient to establish that a defendant committed the crimes charged. A defendant must be a participant and not merely a knowing spectator."); and some may lean the other way. Most of it, though, is straightforward explanation of the charges, and of the ways in which the evidence can be used.

Section 18 of the instructions deals with Count 1 against the defendants, which is the charge that they conspired to stalk Quando Rondo.

That charge has three parts. 1: That two or more people agreed to stalk him; 2: That the defendant joined that plan ("became a member of the conspiracy," in the parlance of the instructions); and 3: That one of the members of that conspiracy did at least one concrete thing ("performed at least one overt act") towards those ends.

What the jurors wanted instruction on was the definition of "conspiracy" and how one becomes a "conspirator"; and what exactly an "overt act" is. (An overt act does not by itself have to be illegal, for example).

Jury note 3 is below:

This one, as you can see, is pretty straightforward. The jury is asking for more information about the word "intent."

The context here has to do with Count 3, which is the charge of stalking Saviay'a Robinson, the victim of the deadly Los Angeles shootout at the center of the trial. (Quando Rondo was allegedly the intended target).

"For each defendant to be found guilty of that charge, the government must prove each of the following elements beyond a reasonable doubt," the instructions begin. "First, the defendant possessed the intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate Saviay'a Robinson." It is that use of "intent" that the jurors had questions about.

Attorneys on both sides agreed when it came to both notes that new wording did not need to be added to the already very long and fought-over jury instructions. Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald felt the same way. So in the case of note 2, Judge Fitzgerald simply re-read the lines in question. For note 3, he simply said that the law doesn’t give a specific meaning of "intent," so the jurors should use the word in the standard way.

So that's it for jury notes 2 and 3. But what about 1? That was the note that came right before the end of deliberations on Wednesday (September 9).

As you can see, this is a request from the jury to see "all" the evidence "in digital form" — presumably a lot easier to view than going through hundreds of pages person-by-person.

Fitzgerald's answer, below, was that this would be provided by 8:30 A.M. the next day — Thursday (September 10).