The man convicted of orchestrating rapper Tupac Shakur’s killing in 1996 has been sentenced to 40 years to life in prison. The sentence includes a 20-year mandatory enhancement for profiting off the murder, Judge Carli Kierny told the court.
“You don’t get to take a man from his family,” she said to Duane “Keffe D” Davis. “You don’t get to take his very life, his whole life, and just walk away from it, especially when that man is Tupac Shakur.”
Davis, 63, was found guilty in August of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon. Much of the two-week trial hinged on Davis’ own accounts of the killing in media and in a memoir, which prosecutors said was precipitated by a scuffle between Davis’ nephew and Shakur on the night of his death.
“He would have been the promise of our parents. I believe when you take away someone like that, you deserve the maximum sentence,” Shakur’s younger sister Sekyiwa Shakur said during her victim statement Tuesday.
She said her brother was “born an icon” and was raised to be a human rights activist and a protector for his family and friends.
“He was a father figure to me,” Sekyiwa Shakur aded. “It wasn’t just me in everybody in our immediate family, our extended family, and as we got older, our community as a whole.”
It took jurors less than three hours to convict him. On Tuesday, Davis appeared in court shackled in handcuffs and wearing a navy blue prison uniform. When asked if he wanted to address the court, including Shakur’s family, Davis declined.
“I’m good,” he said.
Pointing to five other convictions and Davis’ public boasting, Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal asked for the maximum possible sentence.
“Whatever your decision is, ultimately, in my mind, he deserves the maximum possible sentence because he’s earned through his actions, his behavior, who he is as he stands here today,” Palal told the judge. “He 100% deserves the maximum possible sentence.”
Davis remains the only person convicted in Shakur’s murder. He was not accused of firing the fatal shots, but prosecutors argued he provided the gun and helped orchestrate the attack.
His role in Shakur’s assassination in Las Vegas had been at the center of a nearly 30-year mystery that riveted rap fans, true-crime experts and conspiracy theorists.
Investigators at the time pointed to an East Coast-West Coast record label rivalry that they said prompted a bloody feud between Shakur’s entourage and Davis’ henchmen. They blamed Shakur, his friends and other associates for stymying their investigation, and failed to connect the dots between known gang leaders, prosecutors said.
The case went cold for decades until 2019, when Davis released his memoir “Compton Street Legend.” In it, Davis recounted his involvement in Shakur’s assassination and described himself as a “shotcaller” for the South Side Crips. Their rivals, Mob Piru, was associated with Shakur’s record label and its co-founder, Marion “Suge” Knight.
During the trial over the summer, Palal argued that Davis “went hunting” for Shakur and Knight after they were spotted at a Las Vegas hotel beating up Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, known as the “prince” of Compton in California because of his ties to Davis.
Knight was in the car with Shakur and was also shot that night. He survived his injuries, but Shakur died six days later.
His death sparked a gang war hundreds of miles away in Compton, and was followed by the killing six months later of New York-based rapper Christopher Wallace, also known as Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie.
No one was ever charged or convicted in Wallace’s death.