Jurors heard closing arguments on Monday (Aug. 31) in the murder trial over the killing of Tupac Shakur, with prosecutors telling them that Duane “Keffe D” Davis admitted to “hunting” the rapper — and that his later disavowals of his story “make no sense.”
Wrapping up a two-week trial over the long-unsolved 1996 drive-by shooting that left the rapper dead at 25, prosecutor Binu Palal told jurors that Davis had sought revenge after Tupac beat up his nephew earlier that night at a Las Vegas casino.
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“Duane Davis, in the culture of gangs, could not let that stand,” Palal said in the packed courtroom. “So what did he do? He acquired firearms, got his group together, and went hunting for Mr. Shakur.”
The case against Davis centers on his own statements, including media interviews and a tell-all memoir, in which he openly admitted to a role in the crime. Davis has since disavowed those statements, and his attorney has argued at trial that his client’s story was fictional and cannot be corroborated by any hard evidence.
But in his closing statement on Monday, Palal said the case was “drenched with circumstantial evidence” beyond Davis’ admissions: “It seems like you’ve been told that there’s nothing that exists outside of Mr. Davis’ statements, and that is simply not true.”
On the contrary, Palal told the jury that it would “make no sense” that Davis made his admissions as some kind of elaborate fiction: “If the notion is Mr. Davis is creating this whole story, why would he create a story that makes him legally liable for murder when he could just make himself a witness?”
This is a developing story on an ongoing hearing and will be updated with additional information as the proceedings continue.
Monday’s hearing marks the end of a blockbuster trial into Shakur’s 1996 killing, which remained unsolved for nearly three decades. If convicted, Davis, 63, could be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Shakur, then a rising superstar in the rap world, was killed amid the infamous East Coast-West Coast hip-hop feud, and his death was followed months later by the fatal shooting of rival The Notorious B.I.G. No one was charged with either killing, and the pair of cold cases became a fixture in American cultural history.
But in September 2023, prosecutors unveiled a murder indictment against Davis, a former Crips gang leader in 1990s Los Angeles, claiming he’d orchestrated the killing as revenge after Shakur’s entourage beat up his nephew, Orlando Anderson, earlier that night. They cited his own words as evidence, including a 2019 memoir in which he candidly admitted to being in the car and handing the gun to an unnamed shooter in the backseat.
At trial, prosecutors told jurors that Davis was a key leader of a Compton gang affiliated with the Crips who had killed Shakur as “an act of revenge” after the fight. They admitted that he “did not pull the trigger,” but said he was a “shot caller” who had “made sure that the shooters were armed and ready to execute their revenge.”
Davis’ lawyer argued back that his client likes to “bullshit” and had repeatedly told a fictional account of the famous killing that could not be backed up by real evidence: “What you’re going to find is that the state cannot prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt the claim that Keffe had anything to do with a first-degree murder.”
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