Thirty Years After Tupac's Killing, a Jury Needed Less Than Three Hours to Convict Duane "Keffe D" Davis

Davis, 63, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, is the first and only person ever held legally accountable for Shakur's death. He was straight-faced as the verdict was read, raised a fist on his way out, and asked the judge for an appeal. He is held without bail and faces sentencing on October 13, with the possibility of life in prison without parole. The verdict came exactly two weeks before the 30th anniversary of Shakur's death.

Convicted by His Own Words

Prosecutors never claimed Davis fired the shots. Their case was that he was the "shot caller" who orchestrated the killing as revenge for a beating his nephew, Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, took from Shakur's entourage at the MGM Grand hours earlier, a fight caught on hotel surveillance and itself part of a Crips-Bloods feud entangled with Death Row Records.

The evidence was largely Davis himself: statements to police and his 2019 memoir "Compton Street Legend," in which he placed himself in the car with the shooter and called the killing warranted. "He admits to it seven, eight times over the course of 30 years, and there's no evidence contradicting that fact," District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo told jurors, calling the case a "slam dunk." Selling the memoir, prosecutor Binu Palal added, amounted to "profiting off a murder."

The defense argued the opposite reading of the same facts: that Davis is a liar who wrote the book for fame and money. Attorney Michael Sanft pointed to the absence of a murder weapon, DNA or fingerprints, to inconsistencies in Davis' accounts, and to the fact that neither Suge Knight, who was driving Shakur that night, nor Sean "Diddy" Combs testified despite appearing on the state's witness list. "You have no proof. There is no evidence," Sanft told the jury. It did not matter: the verdict was unanimous, from a panel whose youngest member, at 21, was born nearly a decade after Shakur died.

The Long Road There

Shakur was 25, an international star whose poetic, politically charged lyrics made him one of the best-selling artists in the world, when he was shot multiple times in his car near the Las Vegas Strip. Anderson, long the prime suspect, denied involvement, was never charged, and died in a gang shootout two years later. Every other man allegedly in the Cadillac that night is dead too, except Davis, who was arrested in 2023, years after first telling police his story under a proffer agreement.

The vacuum of accountability bred a generation of conspiracy theories, from Tupac-is-alive myths to endless documentaries picking at the case. At the intersection where he was shot, an unofficial memorial of Sharpied tributes and duct-taped flowers has kept growing during the trial.

Darryl Harper, a former Death Row producer who flew in for the trial, told CNN the verdict satisfied him, but the loss did not shrink. "I met what probably was one of the best guys I ever met, and it just ended, sudden like that," he said. "I certainly felt cheated, but I'm sure a lot of the world felt cheated."