Prosecutors portrayed Duane “Keffe D” Davis’s own accounts as proof that he helped arrange Tupac Shakur’s killing, while the defense cast the same statements as self-serving fiction. A Las Vegas jury ultimately accepted the prosecution’s interpretation, though Davis plans to challenge the verdict.

Nearly 30 years after Shakur was shot in a Las Vegas drive-by attack, the case that long stood as one of hip-hop’s most enduring unsolved killings has produced its first conviction. Davis, 63, was found guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon; sentencing is set for October 13.

The prosecution did not contend that Davis fired the shots. Instead, it argued that he supplied the gun and directed a retaliatory attack after Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, was involved in a confrontation with Shakur’s entourage at the MGM Grand hours earlier. Prosecutors relied on Davis’s recorded interviews, media appearances and 2019 memoir, in which he repeatedly placed himself in the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired.¹

In closing arguments, prosecutor Binu Palal said Davis’s changing versions did not erase what he described as a consistent central account: “The core facts remain. The material facts remain.”² Palal argued that Davis’s statements contained details that had not been publicly disclosed and showed he played a leading role in the attack.²

Defense lawyer Michael Sanft countered that investigators had produced no surveillance footage, phone records or physical evidence independently placing Davis in Las Vegas or inside the Cadillac that night. “They have nothing in this case that says that man was here in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996,” Sanft told jurors, arguing that Davis embellished his story for attention and to sell his book.²

The two sides therefore agreed on the case’s central limitation: it rested largely on Davis’s words, not forensic evidence from 1996. They differed sharply on whether those words amounted to a reliable admission or an invented persona. The jury deliberated for less than three hours before convicting him, while Davis told the court he intended to appeal.¹