A jury has found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of orchestrating the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur.
After a day of closing arguments, Davis was found guilty of murder with the use of a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang, according to ABC News. Davis, 63, faces a maximum of life in prison.
The jury deliberated for roughly 90 minutes after a weeks-long trial in Las Vegas. Prosecutors and police claimed that Davis orchestrated Shakur’s murder in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996, and handed the gunman the murder weapon. They believe that the actual shooter was either Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Davis’ nephew, or another man who was in the backseat of a car.
During his closing arguments, prosecutor Binu Palal said that the case was “drenched in circumstantial evidence” and corroborating witnesses, in addition to Davis’ own statements over the years to media and in his own memoir to show that he was guilty of aiding the murder. “For nearly 18 years, Duane Davis has told the police, television, books, YouTube interviewers — anybody that will listen, he has told — he is responsible for the murder of Tupac Shakur,” said Palal. “Tell him you hear him — find him guilty.”
Davis’ attorney Michael Sanft, meanwhile, argued that the only proof that Davis was responsible for Shakur’s murder was through his own confessions, which did not constitute real evidence.
“We have to ask ourselves the question really at this particular point: Why are we here 30 years later if Duane Davis had actually confessed — truly confessed?” he said.
Davis is scheduled to be sentenced on October 13 and will be held without bail. He shared that he plans to appeal the sentence once it’s handed down.
On the night of Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur was shot four times with a Glock .22 pistol while his car was stopped at a red light in Paradise, Nev. The bullets came from a white Cadillac that had pulled up alongside Shakur’s vehicle — which was being driven by his label boss, Marion “Suge” Knight — and struck the hip-hop artist in the chest, arm and thigh, while one of the bullets grazed Knight in the head. Shakur succumbed to his injuries six days later.
Shakur’s murder has long been one of music’s most notorious unsolved crimes. Over the years, Davis boasted about his purported role in Shakur’s killing. In 2018, to drum up anticipation for his upcoming memoir, he appeared in the BET docuseries “Death Row Chronicles,” where he discussed the night of Shakur’s murder, suggesting that the murder weapon was passed from someone in the backseat of the white Cadillac, but he wouldn’t say who. “Going to keep it for the code of the streets,” Davis remarked, adding, “It just came from the backseat, bro.”
Davis released his memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” in 2019, whose intro stated, “I’m one of the only living eyewitnesses to Tupac’s killing,” before describing the night of Shakur’s killing in detail. In the book, Davis claims that he got a Glock and entered the white Cadillac with three others, looking for payback against Shakur and Knight for what they’d done to Anderson. “No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed, the shit was about to go down!” he wrote.
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