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 40 years.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, ex-figure of the South Side Compton Crips – a gang in a sensitive neighborhood 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 don’t have the right to take his life, steal his entire future, and then get away with it. Especially when that man is called Tupac Shakur,” insisted Las Vegas judge Carli Kierny. “It took us 30 years, but today you will answer for your actions,” she added, setting a lesser sentence than the irreducible life sentence requested by the prosecution.
Duane Davis would thus have to serve 40 years behind bars before being able to apply for parole, with no guarantee that it will be granted to him. Even before the sentencing, Mr. Davis’ lawyer, Michael Sanft, announced that they would “appeal this decision.”
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 in 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.
Deadly rivalries
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.
When traveling through the American West, each label used rival Los Angeles gangs for protection: Death Row Records used 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. Investigators have still 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.
At 63 years old, Duane Davis is the last member of the vehicle’s crew still alive. As early as 2008, he admitted to investigators that he was in the Cadillac. But his confidences took place within the framework of an agreement providing for partial immunity, and could not be used against him.
Overwhelming book
But as the years passed, the ex-gang member began to speak out in the media, before publishing a damning memoir in 2019. In this book, he admits that he was in the passenger seat of the vehicle, that the crew was looking for Tupac for revenge, and that he passed the gun to the occupants of the back seat, without revealing the identity of the shooter.
It was this publication which relaunched the investigation and led to his arrest in 2023, before becoming the central piece of evidence in the trial. Duane Davis “is a five-time convicted felon. He is the head of a violent street gang in Compton and, by his own admission, (…) it was he who gave the order” to kill Tupac, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo recalled Tuesday.
During the trial, Duane Davis tried to retract his confidences. His lawyer assured that his memoirs had been fictionalized by his co-author, and that he was in Los Angeles on the evening of the murder. A visibly ineffective defense to the jurors, who only needed three hours to agree on his guilt.
“You deserve every minute, every minute of the maximum sentence,” Tupac’s sister Sekyiwa Shakur told him in court on Tuesday. “It’s time to think about what you have done to this world.”
