United States: At 63, Duane Davis receives at least 40 years in prison for the murder of Tupac Shakur

It’s the epilogue to the most famous cold case in hip-hop history. Thirty years after the death of Tupac Shakur, the ex-gang member accused of having ordered the murder of the rap legend was sentenced Tuesday to a minimum prison term of forty years.

Compromising memories

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, former figure of the South Side Compton Crips – a gang in a sensitive area of Los Angeles – was found guilty at the end of August, at the end of a trial which dissected his compromising confidences on the night of the murder, taken from his own memoirs.

“You have no right to tear a man away from his family. You have no right to take his life, steal his entire future, and then get away with it. Especially when that man’s name is Tupac Shakur,” insisted Las Vegas judge Carli Kierny. “It took us thirty years, but today you will answer for your actions,” she added, setting a lesser sentence than the irreducible life sentence requested by the prosecution.

Aged 63, Duane Davis would have to serve forty years behind bars before being able to apply for parole, with no guarantee that it will be granted to him. Even before the sentencing, his lawyer, Michael Sanft, announced that they would “appeal this decision”.

The rivalry with P. Diddy

For three weeks, the trial dissected the fatal gang revenge on Tupac Shakur, the night of September 7, 1996 in Las Vegas. According to the prosecution, Duane Davis organized the murder of the rapper to take revenge for the beating of his nephew Orlando Anderson, in which Tupac had participated a few hours earlier, after attending a fight with boxer Mike Tyson in Las Vegas.

At the time, the world of American rap was at loggerheads and Tupac, author of the hits California Love and All Eyez on Me, was then the leading figure of Californian hip-hop. The West Coast label Death Row Records, where Tupac worked, was the sworn enemy of the New York record company Bad Boy Records, founded by P. Diddy.

The murder weapon never found

When traveling through the American West, each label used rival Los Angeles gangs for protection: Death Row Records called on Mob Piru, while Bad Boy Records used the South Side Compton Crips. The beating of Duane Davis' nephew in Las Vegas was itself motivated by a clash that occurred between the Crips and Mob Piru a few weeks earlier, according to prosecutors. But this revenge story took nearly three decades to prove.

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Investigators have always failed to find the white Cadillac from which the fatal shots of Tupac Shakur were fired. They also never found the murder weapon and the passengers in the vehicle gradually died one after the other, victims of gang violence. Duane Davis is thus the last member of the vehicle's crew still alive.