Duane Davis is convicted of orchestrating the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur

Duane Davis, the former Southside Compton Crips leader known as Keefe D, was convicted of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon on Monday, August 31, for orchestrating the 1996 drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur near the Las Vegas Strip. The jury deliberated for under three hours. Davis, who is 63, told the court he wanted to appeal as soon as the judge ordered him held without bail, and his sentencing is set for October 13.

The verdict closed a case that sat unsolved for almost thirty years. Prosecutors never argued Davis fired the gun. Their case was that he was the shot caller who obtained the weapon, organised the party that went hunting and armed the shooter, in retaliation for a beating his nephew Orlando Anderson took at the MGM Grand hours earlier.

The last week of the trial explained part of why it took so long. Detective Dan Long, who worked the homicide from 2004 until he retired in 2017, testified that after recording an interview with Davis in Los Angeles on September 9, 2009, he intended to drive back to Las Vegas, write a warrant and have Davis arrested. "There was plenty of probable cause to arrest for murder," he told the court. Instead the district attorney's office told him to stand down and review it. A proffer agreement appeared to be the complication, and Long said his team could not establish its terms. The arrest came in 2023, fourteen years later.

Long also described corroboration failing at every turn. He could find no hospital record for Anderson on Maryland Parkway in 1996 and never located the rented Cadillac that Davis had described. That absence became the defence's whole argument: attorney Michael Sanft told the jury the physical evidence never placed his client in the car, and that Davis's 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend was written to sell books rather than to confess.

Prosecutors leaned on Davis's own words instead. Binu Palal walked the jury through gang detectives, security staff and witnesses who each put Davis at the top of the Southside Crips before he had said anything at all, then through a decade of recorded interviews, jail calls and statements to federal investigators. Marc DiGiacomo called it a slam dunk. Davis never testified.

The prosecution rested after 25 witnesses across a week and a half; the defence called three and rested on Thursday, August 27. Testimony at trial also traced what followed the shooting: a ten-day gang war in Compton between the South Side Crips and Mob Piru that left three more people dead and ten more shot at. Shakur was hit multiple times on September 7, 1996 and died six days later. Suge Knight, driving the BMW, survived.

Davis remains the only person ever charged. The three other men prosecutors say were in the Cadillac are dead. Outside court, a colleague of Shakur's said the conspiracy was larger and that Davis is not the only person who should answer for it. Davis has long claimed Sean Combs offered him and the Southside Crips a million dollars to kill Shakur and Knight, a claim Combs denies.

The case is filed under hip-hop. We covered it from the opening of the trial in Las Vegas through jury selection with Shakur's cousin watching in court and Davis clearing Combs of a role in the killing.