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A Las Vegas jury on Monday found a one-time Compton gang leader guilty in the slaying of rapper Tupac Shakur, marking a turning point in a murder mystery that captivated the public’s attention for decades.
Jurors deliberated for just a few hours in the murder trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who was accused of orchestrating the fatal 1996 shooting of Shakur as the rapper sat in a BMW next to Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight. The 63-year-old Davis faces a life sentence.
After the verdict, members of Shakur’s family hugged the two prosecutors. Davis said he would appeal his conviction.
During the two-week trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Davis, as his gang’s shot caller, “went hunting” — arranging the rapper’s killing by getting a .40-caliber handgun and passing it to fellow members of the Southside Crips-Burris Street gang as they rode in a Cadillac near the Las Vegas Strip on Sept. 7, 1996.
The motive, prosecutors told jurors, was revenge. Hours earlier, after a Mike Tyson fight, Shakur, Knight and members of the Mob Piru gang associated with Death Row had beaten Orlando Anderson, a nephew of Davis, at the MGM Grand.
The Pirus, a Blood gang, had a longtime rivalry with the Southside Crips on the streets of Compton. That feud escalated as the Crips became the protection for East Coast rap and Sean Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment against Death Row’s Mob Pirus.
“Duane Davis, in the culture of gangs,” could not let the beating of his nephew stand, Clark County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Binu Palal told jurors. “He acquired a firearm, got his group together, and went hunting for Mr. Shakur or Mr. Knight.”
The trial of the alleged mastermind behind the killing of famed rapper and actor Tupac Shakur got underway in Las Vegas, with prosecutors alleging the shooting was the culmination of a gang rivalry and fight at the MGM Grand.
In closing their case, prosecutors told jurors they had not only heard Davis’ own incriminating words in two police interviews and a documentary, but also had been presented with a deluge of circumstantial evidence linking him to one of the most famous murders in modern history.
But Michael Sanft, Davis’ defense lawyer, argued that the prosecution had no forensics, no eyewitness and not a single shred of physical evidence placing Davis in the Cadillac with the shooter.
“The state wants you to believe this was a confession, that he was somehow there in person at the time of the shooting,” Sanft told jurors. “We can’t even put Davis in Las Vegas.”
Sanft claimed his client fabricated his story in a 2008 interview with Los Angeles police and federal authorities as part of their investigation into the 1997 slaying of rapper Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, to avoid a life sentence for drug dealing. He later repeated parts of the fabricated stories to help sell his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” Sanft argued.
“You’re reading a book that is fiction and not fact,” Sanft told jurors.
