Keffe D claims innocence after conviction for Tupac Shakur's murder and announces fight for release
Duane "Keffe D" Davis, the only person ever criminally charged with the murder of Tupac Shakur, continues to maintain that he was not responsible for the death of one of the most influential rappers in history even after his conviction. In his first interview after a Las Vegas jury found him guilty of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, 63-year-old Davis said he was innocent, accused police officers, prosecutors and certain witnesses of lying, and said he expected to be released through the appeals process. The interview was published on September 4, 2026, just a few days after the verdict delivered on August 31 in Clark County, Nevada. According to Reuters, after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously concluded that Davis was criminally responsible for organizing the attack in which Shakur was fatally wounded almost three decades earlier. The verdict is the first criminal resolution in a case that had been one of the best-known unsolved crimes connected with the American music industry since 1996.
Speaking from the Clark County Detention Center, Davis showed no willingness to accept the verdict. He told The Hollywood Reporter that he "is not a murderer" and that an inaccurate picture of the events and of his character had been presented against him during the trial. He also challenged the credibility of the testimony of several people who testified against him and repeated his claim that his earlier public statements, interviews and book had been used out of context. His defense pursued a similar strategy before the jury, arguing that Davis's stories about the murder had for years been exaggerated, contradictory or fabricated for publicity and profit. Prosecutors, by contrast, argued that the repeated retelling of key details over many years demonstrated that Davis knew information that could only have been known by someone directly involved in the events.
Verdict after almost 30 years of waiting
Tupac Shakur was fatally wounded on September 7, 1996, in Las Vegas, after the car he was in stopped at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip. He was a passenger in a BMW driven by Marion "Suge" Knight, co-founder of the record label Death Row Records. According to police and court accounts reported by the Associated Press, a white Cadillac pulled up alongside their vehicle, after which gunfire was opened from it. Shakur was struck several times, while Knight survived with injuries. The rapper died six days later, on September 13, 1996, at the age of 25.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that the attack was not random, but retaliation for a physical confrontation that had taken place earlier that same evening at the MGM Grand. There, following the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon boxing match, Shakur and members of his entourage participated in an attack on Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, Davis's nephew. Prosecutors presented the jury with a theory according to which Davis, then a prominent member of the South Side Compton Crips, gathered a group of people after the beating, obtained a weapon and set out to look for Shakur and Knight. Reuters reports that prosecutors did not claim Davis personally fired the shots, but that he organized the retaliation and enabled the attack. Under that version of events, the fact that he was not the person who pulled the trigger did not exclude his criminal responsibility for murder.
According to evidence presented during the proceedings, the white Cadillac contained Davis as well as Orlando Anderson, Deandrae "Big Dre" Smith and Terry "Bubble Up" Brown. All three died before Davis's trial, and none of them was criminally prosecuted for Shakur's murder. Anderson was for years investigators' main suspect in the shooting, but he was never charged and was killed in 1998 in a separate armed confrontation. The Associated Press reports that different claims emerged over the decades about who actually fired from the Cadillac, which is why even after Davis's conviction not every detail of the attack itself has been legally resolved. What the jury accepted was the prosecution's argument that Davis had a sufficiently important role in planning and carrying out the attack to be guilty of murder.
Davis's own words became key evidence
The prosecution's case did not center on new forensic evidence discovered decades after the crime, but on Davis's statements from different periods. The Associated Press reports that prosecutors particularly highlighted four groups of his statements to the jury: a 2008 interview with federal investigators, a 2009 interview with Las Vegas police, a recorded interview for a documentary project in 2017, and the memoir "Compton Street Legend" published in 2019. In those materials, Davis described in different formulations the events preceding the shooting, the search for Shakur and the moment when the weapon ended up in the rear of the Cadillac. Prosecutors argued that the key elements of his story were repeated consistently enough for the jury to regard them as admissions rather than fiction.
Particularly sensitive was the issue of the 2008 interview with federal investigators, conducted as part of another criminal case and under certain protections connected with an agreement with authorities at the time. Davis's defense tried to prevent those statements from being used, arguing that he made them believing they would not be used against him. In June 2026, Judge Carli Kierny allowed the disputed materials to be used, including the book and earlier statements. The Associated Press reported that the court took into account the fact that Davis later spoke publicly about the same events in interviews, documentary content and memoirs. Prosecutors argued that precisely those later public repetitions of his account opened the door for the content to be compared and used at trial.
Davis is now once again disputing the book that became one of the best-known parts of the evidence. In an interview published after the verdict, he said that he "never wrote that book" in the sense in which prosecutors presented it, claiming that he told the co-author a series of stories and provided photographs, but that he did not read or approve the manuscript as an accurate record of events. The defense had already emphasized at trial that the memoir has a co-author, that it contains a publisher's disclaimer, and that individual details cannot automatically be treated as a literal confession. Prosecutors responded that the book was not being considered in isolation, but together with Davis's recorded statements and other evidence. The jury ultimately accepted their argument.
The defense argued that the case was full of holes
Davis's attorney Michael Sanft tried to convince the jury that the prosecution's case was built around a man who had exaggerated and changed stories for years. The defense emphasized the lack of physical evidence directly placing Davis in the Cadillac, problems in the original police files, contradictory witness memories and the fact that almost 30 years had passed between the shooting and the trial. According to Reuters, Sanft argued in his closing statement that the contents of the memoir were being presented as fact even though the defense considered them fictionalized. The defense also attacked the quality of parts of the investigation, citing missing documents and failures in cooperation among the various police agencies that had worked on the case over the years.
Prosecutors responded that Davis's own behavior explained why the case regained momentum. According to reports by the Associated Press and Reuters, police had for years considered him an important person in the investigation, but did not have enough evidence to bring charges. The situation changed after his public appearances, documentary interviews and the publication of the book. In July 2023, Las Vegas police searched a home connected to Davis in Henderson, Nevada, and in September of that year a grand jury indicted him. He has since remained the only person against whom a criminal charge has been filed in this case.
According to reports by U.S. media, around twenty prosecution witnesses and several defense witnesses testified at the trial, including former police officers and people connected with events from the 1990s. The proceedings lasted eleven court days, including nine days of testimony. Jurors listened to hours of recordings of Davis's earlier conversations and compared them with the defense theory that they amounted to boasting and myth-making. After closing arguments on August 31, they needed less than three hours to return a guilty verdict. For Tupac Shakur's family, the moment carried particular emotional significance; the Associated Press reported that the rapper's sister Sekyiwa Shakur cried after the verdict was read, while some family members embraced the prosecutors.
Announcement of an appeal and the question of what has actually already been filed
Immediately after the verdict, Davis told the judge that he wanted to appeal, and he repeated the same point in his first interview from detention. At the same time, he claimed that his legal team had "already filed" an appellate step before the trial even began and that his civil rights had been violated. However, the Associated Press recorded that Judge Kierny responded to him in the courtroom that a formal appeal of the conviction comes after sentencing. Davis's statement that something had been filed before the start of the trial must therefore be distinguished from a formal appeal of the guilty verdict, which the judge explicitly said would follow sentencing.
His statements make clear that the defense will continue to challenge the way his earlier conversations with investigators were used. Davis claims that his federal agreement protected him against those statements being used against him and that local authorities violated his rights when they introduced them into the proceedings. Before the trial, the court rejected the defense request to exclude the key materials, so the issue has already been the subject of a serious legal dispute. Nevertheless, an appellate court has yet to rule on any specific grounds for appeal after the first-instance proceedings are completed. It is therefore currently not possible to claim either that Davis will be released or that the verdict will be upheld; the only certainty is that he has publicly announced that he will continue his legal fight.
Sentencing will take place on October 13
According to Reuters, sentencing is scheduled for October 13, 2026. Davis was found guilty of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, and the most severe possible sentence in his case is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Nevada law for first-degree murder also provides other forms of lengthy prison sentences, depending on the circumstances and the court's decision. Under the current Nevada Revised Statutes, the possibilities include life imprisonment without parole, life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after at least 20 years, or a 50-year sentence with the possibility of parole after at least 20 years. The use of a deadly weapon may have additional sentencing consequences under separate provisions of state law.
After the verdict, according to the Associated Press, prosecutors announced that they would drop an additional element of the charge related to a criminal gang because of witness logistics. That decision does not change the fact that the jury found Davis guilty of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon. The final length of the sentence will not be known until after the hearing in October. Until then, Davis remains in custody without bail while his defense prepares its next legal steps.
A case that for decades grew beyond the boundaries of a criminal investigation
The murder of Tupac Shakur long ago became more than a single unsolved police case. At the time of his death, Shakur was one of rap's biggest stars, and his music, films and public appearances continued to influence popular culture for decades after 1996. The Associated Press notes that he had five albums reach number one on the U.S. charts, six Grammy Award nominations and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. His death, followed by the murder of Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G., in Los Angeles in 1997, became symbols of the violence that marked part of the American hip-hop scene in the 1990s.
Davis's conviction therefore has broader cultural significance, but it does not remove all of the uncertainties that accumulated over almost three decades. The court proceedings gave the jury a specific question: had it been proven that Davis was criminally responsible for Shakur's murder? The jury answered yes. At the same time, debates remain about the identity of the person who fired the fatal shots, the quality of the initial investigation, relations among police agencies and the credibility of numerous stories that circulated for years through documentaries, books and interviews.
For Davis, the next phase of the case is legal rather than media-driven. His claims of innocence and alleged lies by witnesses do not in themselves alter the verdict delivered by the jury. The defense will have to turn those arguments into specific grounds for appeal and demonstrate that errors serious enough to affect the legality of the verdict occurred during the proceedings. Unless and until an appellate court rules otherwise, Davis remains convicted of organizing the murder of Tupac Shakur. Almost 30 years after the shooting in Las Vegas, the case has thus received a guilty verdict for the first time, but the legal battle surrounding it is only now entering a new phase.
Sources:
- The Hollywood Reporter / Yahoo News - first interview with Duane Davis after the guilty verdict, his claims of innocence, witnesses, the book and the appeal (link)
- Associated Press - report on the verdict, course of the trial, reactions in the courtroom, evidence and the judge's clarification that an appeal of the conviction follows sentencing (link)
- Reuters - verdict, duration of the trial, prosecution and defense arguments, and the sentencing date of October 13, 2026 (link)
- Associated Press - June 2026 court decision on the admissibility of the memoir "Compton Street Legend" and Davis's earlier statements as evidence (link)
- Nevada Legislature - current provisions of the Nevada Revised Statutes on first-degree murder and possible sentences (link)