A Las Vegas jury found guilty this Monday Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63 years old, for the first-degree murder of the American rapper Tupac Shakur, in a decision that represents the first judicial conviction directly linked to one of the most well-known and long-investigated homicides in music history.
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According to the TMZ portal, Davis was found guilty of murder with the use of a deadly weapon, with the intent to promote, favor, or assist a criminal organization. According to the information provided during the trial, he now faces a possible maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The accused had already expressed to the court his intention to appeal if found guilty.
The ruling was issued almost 30 years after the shooting that occurred on the night of September 7, 1996, when Shakur was traveling in a BMW through Las Vegas and was attacked from another vehicle. The musician was shot several times and died six days later, on September 13, at the age of 25.
One of the central elements of the process was that the prosecutors did not claim that Davis pulled the trigger. Their argument was that he played a leadership role in the attack and acted as the so-called “shot caller,” that is, the one who gave the instructions and provided the weapon used in the homicide.
The prosecuting entity argued that the attack was a retaliation for a fight that occurred hours earlier in Las Vegas, in which Tupac and members of his entourage confronted Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Davis’s nephew.
According to the accusation, after that confrontation Davis would have organized the response and handed the weapon to the shooter, whom the prosecutors consider could have been Anderson or another man who was riding in the back seat of the vehicle.
Anderson, who denied during his life having participated in the murder, died in 1998 without having been formally charged for Shakur’s death.
During the trial, the prosecutors especially relied on statements made by Davis over the years.
Among the background presented to the jurors was a 2008 police interview, in which Davis stated that he had given a weapon to his nephew and indicated that he was the one who fired the fatal shots.
The prosecution also used – according to TMZ – passages from Davis’s memoirs and other public statements in which he described his participation and the events surrounding the attack.
The defense, on the other hand, questioned the credibility of those statements. Davis’s lawyers argued that his accounts were exaggerations and “stories” intended to build an image of relevance within the criminal world.
During their arguments, the defense claimed that Davis was “full of shit” and argued that, precisely because of the lack of sufficient evidence, he had not been formally charged for the crime for decades.
However, the accused did not testify during the trial.
The judicial process included the testimony of approximately two dozen witnesses presented by the prosecution, while the defense called only three.
The evidence presented sought to reconstruct the chain of events that occurred during the night of the attack, the prior confrontation between the groups, and the alleged role subsequently played by Davis.
The investigation remained for years without suspects or convictions. The case took a turn in 2023, when Davis was arrested and formally charged with murder.
The sentence against Davis will be determined later by the court. The accused, for his part, has anticipated that he will appeal the guilty verdict.
