A Las Vegas jury is now deliberating after hearing closing arguments in the trial of the South Side Compton Crips gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of ordering the murder of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur .
Davis, 63, is accused of leading a group of men to kill Shakur in retaliation for the beating of his nephew, though not of pulling the trigger himself. Davis has pleaded not guilty.
Police said they long suspected Davis, but did not have enough evidence to charge him until he went public with his story in media appearances and a memoir he published in 2019. The book, as well as tapes of secret meetings with investigators, make up most of the prosecution’s case.
Over the weeks-long trial, Marc DiGiacomo, the Clark county district attorney, and Binu Palal, the chief deputy district attorney, brought 25 witnesses to the stand – including some who had to be ordered by the court because they were reluctant to testify.
During the proceedings, Davis’s attorney, Michael Sanft, tried to frame the stories and statements as the exaggerated and embellished claims of a man hoping to benefit from the public interest and unanswered questions around Shakur’s murder.
In the final moments of the trial, prosecutors hammered home their arguments that Davis called the shots for the attack on Shakur that night based on Davis’s own statements.
Palal told jurors on Monday that Davis wanted revenge after Shakur’s entourage beat up his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, in the lobby of the MGM Grand casino and hotel on 7 September 1996. Anderson, who died two years later in an unrelated shootout, was a member of a rival gang in Compton, California.
“So what did [Davis] do? He acquired a firearm, got his group together, and went hunting for Mr Shakur,” Palal said.
Davis’s defense attorney, however, questioned the integrity of the Las Vegas metropolitan police department’s investigation, describing its officers as “dirty”. Sanft portrayed his client’s book as a fictionalized, and at least partially ghost-written, account that could not be taken as a factual confession.
“What did he really confess to that was true?” Sanft said.
Sanft showed the jury video footage of Davis appearing confused by an interviewer’s questions about whether he and others with him were carrying guns the night of Shakur’s murder.
“Does that sound like someone who wrote his own book?” Sanft said.
But DiGiacomo, the county prosecutor, said during rebuttal that the case was a “slam dunk” and that Davis’s only defense was to hope that the jury members “somehow don’t believe a fully corroborated confession”.
“Go and read his book if you want, you will not be smarter for it,” DiGiacomo said. “He shouldn’t be out there profiting on a murder in our jurisdiction.”
“Mr Davis is attempting to escape responsibility for a crime everybody knows he committed, even him and he admits to it – for seven or eight times over the course of 30 years and there’s no evidence contradicting that fact,” DiGiacomo added. “Hold him accountable to the crime he committed.”
Davis sat stone-faced through closing arguments.
Prosecutors have argued Davis’s story is generally consistent and that he has essentially admitted to arranging Shakur’s killing, which under Nevada law is enough to be charged with murder. Prosecutors played eight hours of recordings, taken from four separate events in different years, during which Davis shared in his own words what happened the night of the shooting.
Shakur and the founder of his label, Marion “Suge” Knight, had attended a Mike Tyson boxing match at the casino when the altercation with Anderson took place, and were on their way to an after-party. A white Cadillac pulled up next to them while they were stopped at a red light, and someone in that car began shooting, according to investigators.
In his book, Davis claimed to have been in that car, and that he had brought a .40-caliber Glock with him. “Them jumping on my nephew gave us the green light to want to do something to their ass,” he wrote. “Pac chose the wrong game to play.”
At the trial earlier this month, prosecutors played a 2008 recording of Davis telling detectives that he handed a pistol to his nephew Anderson, who fired the shots that killed Shakur. Anderson died in a 1998 shootout in Compton, California. The two other men in the car have since died as well.
While the trial has finally come to an end, family members had been left to wonder for years why it took so long for investigators to reach a conclusion in the case.
“We’ve been waiting 30 years to grieve properly,” Zayd Akinyela, Shakur’s cousin, told reporters outside the courtroom when the trial was under way. “A lot of people don’t get to grieve until they understand what happened to their loved one and how it happened.”
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
Davis, 63, is accused of leading a group of men to kill Shakur in retaliation for the beating of his nephew, though not of pulling the trigger himself. Davis has pleaded not guilty.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Gabrielle Canon and Roque Planas. Published 31 Aug 2026, 09:42 pm.
