Tupac Murder Trial Heads to Jury After Swift Defense
The murder trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur is heading to a jury sooner than expected, after a second week that saw prosecutors rest their case, a jailhouse recording played in court, and a defense that wrapped in under two hours.
Davis, 63, faces one charge of murder with a deadly weapon in the shooting of Shakur on the Las Vegas Strip in September 1996. The trial is being held in the Eighth Judicial District Court of Clark County, Nevada.
On Monday, 24 August, prosecutors resumed their case with testimony from filmmaker Michael Dorsey, who had worked on a BET docuseries in which Davis gave interviews discussing his role in the killing. Jurors watched hours of unedited footage from that project, including moments in which Davis declined to apologise to Shakur's family, according to Billboard.
Police officers and investigators followed Dorsey to the stand. Among them was Robert Ladd, who testified that Davis was a "shot caller" within his Compton gang. Ladd told jurors that Davis's nephew, Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson — the man prosecutors allege pulled the trigger — could not have opened fire on Shakur without his uncle's permission. "The younger gang members are supposed to do what they're told without hesitation," Ladd said, as reported by Billboard and CNN.
As prosecutors neared the end of their case, they played a jailhouse recording from 2023 in which Davis said, "I got blood on my money." The recording was among more than eight hours of recordings played for the jury, the majority featuring Davis himself discussing the killing.
On Wednesday, 26 August, the prosecution rested its case, having called 24 witnesses in total. A forensic pathologist detailed Shakur's fatal wounds during the trial, and some members of Shakur's family stepped out of the courtroom before prosecutors displayed autopsy photos.
The defense opened on Thursday, 27 August, and moved quickly. Davis's attorneys called just three witnesses — all former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers — finishing in less than two hours. One witness testified that he saw a light-coloured Cadillac arrive and leave the Las Vegas mansion of Suge Knight, the Death Row Records co-founder who was driving the car in which Shakur was shot, on the night of the crime. Another testified that police records had to be locked to prevent interference from "curious" staffers, and that some files were later lost.
Davis did not testify in his own defence.
The brevity of the defense case means the trial reaches the jury well ahead of the pace many observers expected. Prosecution evidence was voluminous — two dozen witnesses, eight hours of recordings, jailhouse audio — while the defense chose to challenge the investigation's integrity rather than mount a narrative of its own.
Jury instructions were scheduled for Friday, 28 August, with closing arguments set for the morning of Monday, 31 August, according to Billboard and Fox 5 Las Vegas. After that, the case goes to twelve jurors in Clark County, nearly thirty years after Shakur was killed.
