Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the former California gang leader convicted of murder for orchestrating the 1996 fatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur, has been sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.
“For three years, I’ve heard you say some variation of the same thing … ‘Yeah, I was involved in this. But I’m different. I’ve moved on. I got out of Compton. I’m a grandfather now,’” Judge Carli Kierny said Tuesday as she delivered the sentence.
“You don’t get to take a man from his family. You don’t get to take his very life, his whole future from him and just walk away from it,” Kierny continued.
On 7 September 1996, Shakur was gunned down near the Las Vegas strip shortly after a Mike Tyson boxing match. He succumbed to his injuries days later.
For decades, his murder remained unsolved and one of hip-hop’s most enduring mysteries. Davis is the only person to be convicted in connection to Shakur’s murder.
“It was hard sitting, listening over and over and over again to someone describe – bit by bit, how they hunted Tupac Amaru Shakur down,” the rapper’s sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, said on Tuesday minutes before Davis was sentenced.
She described her brother as a father figure. “He was who God trusted to take care of me,” she told the court.
The grief from her brother’s murder led Sekyiwa Shakur to be hospitalized several times for depression, suicidal ideation and PTSD, she said.
She and the rapper’s stepbrother, Maurice Shakur, called for Davis to face the maximum penalty.
“Time to sit down and contemplate what you’ve done to the world, not just to me,” Sekyiwa Shakur said.
Davis stared intently, but appeared stoic as the relatives spoke. He vowed earlier during the hearing to appeal the case.
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A confluence of several factors hindered the investigation. The code of silence within street culture made some witnesses averse to police cooperation. Las Vegas police were skeptical about leads from their Compton counterparts, given that the head of security for Shakur’s record label was a former Compton cop.
Orlando Anderson, a gangster and Davis’s nephew, was on law enforcement’s radar as the possible gunman. The night Shakur was killed, the young rap star got into an altercation with Anderson. Las Vegas police interviewed Anderson, but he was never arrested. Anderson later died in 1998.
But then, in 2023, Davis was arrested on a murder charge.
It was Davis’s own media tour, touting his status as one of the last surviving eyewitnesses, and a 2019 “tell-all” memoir that led to the breakthrough.
Davis had felt emboldened by a 2008 backdoor deal he brokered with police. He spoke candidly to investigators about Shakur’s shooting, who had actually been seeking information about the death of Christopher Wallace, known as Biggie Smalls or The Notorious BIG. Under a proffer agreement, Davis was not to face charges for any offenses he shared.
In his memoir, Compton Street Legend, Davis wrote that he and a group of other men targeted Shakur and his entourage, seeking retribution for the scuffle with his nephew.
The memoir and the interview became central to prosecutors’ case. They argued the details amounted to a confession and that his public remarks voided the proffer agreement.
During Davis’s murder trial, his defense team maintained that these details were embellished. They also argued, during the trial, that there was no physical evidence, such as a murder weapon, tying Davis to the Las Vegas slaying.
Ultimately, jurors sided with the state.
