Tupac Murder Trial, Day Two: Aging Evidence and a Pivotal Police Interview Take Center Stage

The second day of the murder trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis — the former South Side Compton Crips leader charged in connection with the 1996 shooting death of Tupac Shakur — opened with forensic testimony and audio from a decades-old police interview that a judge had previously ruled could be used in court.

Davis, 63, faces one count of murder with a deadly weapon in Clark County, Nevada. Prosecutors allege he helped plan the September 1996 shooting of Shakur in Las Vegas, though they do not accuse him of pulling the trigger. Davis has pleaded not guilty. The trial, unfolding nearly three decades after Shakur was killed on the Las Vegas Strip, is the first criminal proceeding to directly charge an individual in the rapper's death.

Shakur was shot on September 7, 1996, and died at a Las Vegas hospital six days later, on September 13.

Day two of proceedings began with continued playback of audio from a 1997 interview between Davis and Fred Miller, a former Los Angeles police detective who had investigated Davis in connection with the murder of Christopher Wallace, better known as Notorious B.I.G. The Guardian. In legal proceedings, "admissible" means a judge has decided evidence can be shown to the jury. A judge ruled in late July that this police interview met that standard — a decision that cleared a major evidentiary hurdle for the prosecution.

The overlap with the Wallace case surfaced in both testimony and legal argument. Davis was present at a party Christopher Wallace attended before Wallace was shot. Davis's attorney stressed that his client was never charged in Wallace's murder, and the judge instructed jurors that law enforcement did not believe Davis was involved in that killing.

The forensic portion of day two focused on authenticating and interpreting autopsy evidence from 1996. Dr. Lisa Gavin, a forensic pathologist in Clark County, testified as an expert analyst who had reviewed the original autopsy report and photographs. A forensic pathologist is a doctor who specializes in determining cause of death by examining the body and related medical records. Gavin confirmed that photographs of Shakur's body showed evidence of medical interventions — steps taken by doctors to try to save his life after the shooting.

The original medical examiner who conducted Shakur's autopsy has since died, a complication that, nearly thirty years on, required the prosecution to present its forensic findings through a secondhand expert rather than the person who performed the original examination. Gavin was still in medical school in 1996 but brought years of experience interpreting postmortem evidence to the stand.

Thomas Kern, a crime scene analyst for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, also testified. Kern had just started working as a crime scene analyst for the department when Shakur was murdered. He was present at Shakur's autopsy in 1996 and gave brief testimony authenticating autopsy evidence. He faced no cross-examination. Atlanta News First

The trial is proceeding in the Eighth Judicial District Court in Clark County, Nevada — the same jurisdiction where Shakur was shot and died.

The broader context here is that the evidentiary architecture of this case is built almost entirely on aging material: a 1997 police interview, autopsy records from a deceased examiner, and crime scene observations from an analyst who was new to the job at the time. The prosecution's challenge lies in reconstructing a coherent narrative from fragments separated by decades, with key witnesses no longer available. The defense, for its part, will likely press the gaps created by the passage of time — the absence of the original medical examiner, the secondhand nature of Gavin's analysis, and the broad scope of the 1997 interview, which touched on the Wallace murder in which Davis was never charged and which the judge told jurors law enforcement did not connect him to.

The admissibility of the 1997 Davis-Miller interview, settled by judicial ruling in July, gave the prosecution its central piece of direct evidence linking Davis to the Shakur case. How jurors weigh that interview against the defense's framing of it, and how they assess forensic testimony filtered through a second pathologist, will likely determine the outcome.