The lone defendant charged over Tupac Shakur’s killing is due to go on trial nearly 30 years after the rapper was shot in Las Vegas.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis was charged in 2023 with murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. Three years later, he is now set to face trial. He has pleaded not guilty and denies the allegations against him.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin today, August 10, and is expected to continue through the end of the week. The case will be heard in Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, with the trial itself expected to last about a month. Due to anticipated high public interest, the court is implementing a daily lottery system to distribute available seats in the courtroom once a jury is selected, as public seating in the main courtroom cannot be guaranteed during jury selection.
Even so, the proceedings may not resolve the decades-old mystery over who fired the shots that killed Shakur. Prosecutors argue that Davis supplied the gun and issued the orders for the attack, rather than being identified as the person who pulled the trigger. According to prosecutors, Davis orchestrated the killing in retaliation for an assault on his nephew shortly after the Tyson fight.
The trial will be livestreamed, and only a limited number of seats will be available for members of the public.
Roughly 35 to 45 witnesses are expected to testify. One of them is Leonard Jefferson, who took what is believed to be the final known photograph of Shakur as he arrived next to his BMW.
Shakur was wounded in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996. He was 25 years old and died from gunshot wounds six days later, on September 13. On the night of the shooting, he was in a BMW with Marion “Suge” Knight, the founder of Death Row Records. They had traveled to Las Vegas to watch Mike Tyson fight at the MGM and were later heading to a nightclub. Knight, who was driving, was also struck but suffered minor injuries.
The prosecution’s case is expected to rely heavily on Davis’ own words from interviews and from his 2019 book. In that book, he said he got a handgun from an associate and climbed into a Cadillac with three other people, although he did not say who fired the fatal shots. He allegedly wrote, “No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed, the s**t was about to go down!” Since his arrest, Davis has said his prior statements were false and just an attempt to sell books, and he has blamed his co-author for inserting false information, claiming the book was a work of fiction that he attached his name to strictly for the money.
In a court filing, prosecutors wrote: “In this case, almost all of the evidence the state will seek to introduce, will be to establish the credibility of Defendant’s various accounts of his role in the killing of Tupac Shakur.” By contrast, Davis’ defense strategy is remarkably simple: the jury cannot trust what he says. The defense will point to the parts of the book that are provably false in an attempt to discredit it, as the case will revolve around which statements in the book are truthful and which are not.
Davis, 63, faces up to life in prison if convicted.