A Las Vegas jury has found former South Side Compton Crips gang leader Duane Keith Davis guilty of the murder of Tupac Shakur, bringing the case to a close nearly 30 years after the famous rapper was gunned down.
The jury took about three hours to reach a guilty verdict in a case that relied heavily on multiple confessions from Davis himself, including his description of the killing in the 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend.
Shakur was born in 1971 in East Harlem, New York, and rose to fame in the early nineties, with poetic flow that doubled as sharp commentary on social injustice, including systemic racism, police brutality and the struggles felt by marginalized communities.
Regarded among the greatest rappers to ever live, Shakur affected generations and continued to be celebrated around the world even years after his life was cut short. He was only 25 years old when he died in the hospital days after being shot four times in a car near the Las Vegas Strip.
Reverence for the rapper has long inspired conspiracy theories about his death as questions swirled around who was involved, why the case remained open for years and even whether Shakur was actually dead.
The trial has offered some resolution, even as family members and fans continue to mourn both the man and the years it took to bring details of his death to light.
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 – in their case against Davis.
The 63-year-old man who was accused of instigating the deadly shooting, although not pulling the trigger himself, had spent years telling investigators and interviewers alike of his direct involvement before he was arrested in 2023.
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.
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 7 September 1996. Davis wrote that he had hatched the plan to retaliate against Shakur, after the rapper’s entourage beat his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, in the lobby of the MGM Grand earlier that night. Anderson, who died two years later in an unrelated shootout, was a member of a rival gang in Compton, California.
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’d 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.”
Tupac’s sister, Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur, cried as the verdict was read, while Davis’s son covered his face with his hand, according to the Associated Press.
“It was kinda hard for me to feel so happy at the same time knowing someone is going to jail for so long,” a teary-eyed Shakur fan named Jessica Martin told AP outside the courtroom. “But then I looked over at Tupac’s family and it reminded me of everything they’ve gone through. It’s really emotional.”
Clark county district court judge Carli Kierny scheduled Davis’s sentencing hearing for 13 October. Prosecutors had not sought the death penalty against Davis and, after the verdict, voluntarily dropped their efforts to tack a gang enhancement on to Davis’s conviction.
First-degree murder in Nevada carries penalties ranging from 20 years to life imprisonment. Davis said he plans to appeal the verdict.
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.”
A Los Angeles Times review of police missteps on the case, published in 2015, detailed how authorities failed to investigate Anderson even after details about the conflict between him and Shakur’s entourage became known. Police also declined to follow a lead from a member of Shakur’s entourage, who claimed he could identify the shooters. That witness died weeks later in a separate shooting, the Times reported.
The investigation highlighted why many of his followers, members of his family and Black leaders and entertainers have pointed to the case – and the years it took to reach a conclusion – as yet another indication of racism in a broken justice system.
Investigators, meanwhile, said it was challenging to prove because they struggled to produce physical evidence and faced strong resistance from potential witnesses, including other members of the rapper’s entourage. Even now, some resisted participating in the case and had to be compelled to come to court.
