Jury selection in the murder trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis — the man prosecutors say orchestrated the 1996 drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur — is scheduled to begin Monday, August 10, in a Las Vegas courtroom, more than three decades after one of hip-hop's most investigated killings.

Davis, 63, faces a single count of murder with a deadly weapon, with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang, according to NBC News. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison without parole, Billboard reports. He has pleaded not guilty.

The trial is expected to run at least four weeks after the jury is seated. Interest is high enough that the court has announced a public seating lottery for spectators, according to Fox 5 Las Vegas.

The charge, and the admission

Las Vegas prosecutors secured a grand jury indictment against Davis in 2023, charging him with first-degree murder in the Shakur killing. He was arrested in September of that year.

Davis's own words helped build the case. A former Crips gang leader in 1990s Los Angeles, he admitted in media interviews and his 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend that he was in the Cadillac during the attack and had obtained the .40-calibre handgun used in the shooting. He did not name the shooter. Both backseat passengers — his nephew Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson and DeAndrae "Dre" Smith — are now dead, as is the driver of the car.

Davis has maintained his innocence on the charge itself. In a local television interview, he stated plainly: "I wasn't in Nevada, period."

In late July, Judge Carli Kierny ruled that a police interview of Davis is admissible at trial, NPR reported — a decision that shapes what jurors will hear.

The night of the shooting

On September 7, 1996, Shakur was in the passenger seat of a car driven by Death Row Records founder Suge Knight, leaving a Mike Tyson boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Earlier that evening, Shakur and others had beaten Davis's nephew, Orlando Anderson, in the hotel lobby — an altercation prosecutors describe as the trigger for what followed.

A white Cadillac pulled alongside Shakur's car at a red light. A shooter in the backseat opened fire, striking Shakur four times. He died six days later, on September 13, 1996.

A feud that defined an era

The killing came at the height of the East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry, a conflict that pitted Shakur and Los Angeles-based Death Row Records against New York's Bad Boy Records and its flagship artist, the Notorious B.I.G. Months after Shakur's death, Biggie was shot and killed in Los Angeles; that case remains unsolved.

Davis has described the Shakur shooting as part of a broader gang war between Los Angeles Bloods and Crips that overlapped with — and was fuelled by — the hip-hop feud, rather than a dispute about music alone.

For a case that sat dormant for decades, the trial brings the machinery of a courtroom to a story long told through documentaries, memoirs and conjecture. The jurors selected this month will be the first to hear it as evidence.