Duane Davis’s own words should be the evidence that convicts him, prosecutors told jurors Monday as his long-awaited murder trial opened in Las Vegas.
Binu Palal, the prosecutor addressing the court, said Davis, 63, spent nearly two decades boasting about orchestrating Tupac Shakur’s 1996 killing to anyone who would listen. “For nearly 18 years, Duane Davis has told police, television, books, YouTube interviewers — anybody that will listen he has told he is responsible for the murder of Tupac Shakur,” Palal said in the courtroom.
“Tell him you hear him, find him guilty,” Palal added.
The trial began almost exactly three decades after Shakur, then 25, was gunned down in a drive-by shooting on the Las Vegas Strip on September 7, 1996. The “California Love” rapper died from his wounds six days later, and no one had ever been convicted in the case until Davis’s 2023 arrest.
Davis was not accused of firing the fatal shots himself. Prosecutors have long attributed those to his nephew, Orlando Anderson, a fellow Compton Crips gang member who was killed in a separate shootout two years after Shakur’s death. Instead, Davis faces charges of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang, carrying a potential life sentence.
The prosecution’s theory hinges on Davis’s own repeated admissions, starting with a 2008 police interview conducted while he was being investigated for other criminal activity and seeking immunity. He allegedly told investigators that Shakur and his associates had attacked Anderson hours before the shooting at the MGM Grand following a Mike Tyson boxing match, and that the public beating demanded gang retaliation.
“That was the nature of the gang life in the 1990s in Compton – you had no choice, you could not go back to Compton after being beaten publicly,” Palal told the jury.
Davis allegedly expanded on that account in his 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend,” where he wrote about the circumstances surrounding the killing. “Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their ass,” he wrote in the book, according to prosecutors, who cited it as one of numerous public admissions.
Palal argued Davis’s guilt was also “drenched with circumstantial evidence” supporting his own claims. Prosecutors described Davis as a known “shot-caller” in the Crips and framed the attack on Anderson — compounded by Shakur’s reported ties to the rival Bloods — as the catalyst that made violence unavoidable under gang code.
Defense attorney Michael Sanft sought to dismantle that narrative entirely, telling jurors that Davis’s accounts were fabrications designed for entertainment value rather than truth. He directly compared the memoir to a Hollywood blockbuster in his opening remarks to the jury.
“Has anybody seen the documentary called ‘Titanic,’ with Jack and Rose?” Sanft joked, according to courtroom reports. “What the state wants you to do is take this book as proof. You are reading a book that is fiction and not fact, and the state wants you to believe that this is somehow a confession.”
Sanft pressed the point that prosecutors lacked any concrete evidence placing Davis in Las Vegas on the night of the shooting. He listed the absence of surveillance footage, photographs, paperwork, receipts, phone records or ticket stubs tying his client to the city that evening.
“They have nothing in this case that says that man was in Las Vegas on September 7th, 1996,” Sanft said. “There’s not one thing that says my client Duane Davis was in Las Vegas on that night of the shooting of Tupac Shakur.”
The defense also characterized the memoir as outright fiction, urging jurors to distinguish between historical events and creative storytelling inspired by them. Sanft’s “Titanic” comparison framed Davis’s book as a dramatization rather than a confession, asking the jury to reject the prosecution’s central evidentiary pillar.
If convicted, Davis would become the only person ever found guilty in connection with Shakur’s murder, closing a case that has spawned decades of speculation, documentaries and conspiracy theories. The rapper’s death at age 25 cut short a career that had already produced hits including “Dear Mama,” “Changes” and “Hail Mary,” and his unsolved killing has remained one of music history’s most scrutinized crimes.
The trial continues in Las Vegas.