LAS VEGAS — Given the chance to address Tupac Shakur’s family before he was sentenced for orchestrating the rapper’s killing, Duane “Keffe D” Davis said he was “good.” He asked only that police return belongings taken from his home, pictures among them.
Judge Carli Kierny then sentenced Davis, 63, on Tuesday to 40 years to life in prison, a term that includes a 20-year mandatory enhancement for profiting from the murder, according to NBC News. He receives credit for time served and has said he will appeal.
Davis is the only person ever convicted in the 1996 shooting, and he was never accused of firing the shots. Prosecutors argued he supplied the gun and arranged the attack, and a Las Vegas jury found Davis guilty in August after less than three hours of deliberation.
The sentence ends the only prosecution this crime has produced in thirty years, and it leaves the central question where it was. The three other men in the white Cadillac with Davis that night are dead, CBS News reported, so the case against him leaned heavily on his own words.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told the court Davis “100% deserves the maximum possible sentence,” pointing to five other convictions and years of public boasting, NBC News reported. Palal said Davis “went hunting” for Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight after the two allegedly beat Davis’s nephew at the MGM Grand. Davis led the South Side Compton Crips, rivals of Mob Piru, the gang tied to Shakur’s circle.
The defense never stopped pressing the thinness of the physical record. Attorney Michael Sanft argued that nothing beyond Davis’s own statements placed him in Las Vegas that night, with no surveillance footage or phone records, CBS News reported. In the Tupac Shakur murder trial, jurors instead heard the 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend,” in which Davis described himself as a “shotcaller.”
Sekyiwa Shakur, the rapper’s younger sister, told the court he “would have been the promise of our parents.” Their mother raised him to be a human rights activist, she said, and “he went out in the world to do that,” TRT World reported. Kierny told Davis, “You don’t get to take a man from his family,” adding that “the world never forgot about him.” Shakur was 25 and signed to Death Row Records.
Shakur was shot at a red light on September 7, 1996, and died six days later. Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., was killed about six months afterward, and no one has been charged or convicted in that case. Prosecutors have never named the man who fired in Shakur’s killing, and the only person convicted was never accused of doing so.
