The only individual ever actually charged in the 1996 fatal shooting of Tupac Shakur was sentenced today to 40 years to life in prison.
Convicted of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon on August 31, Duane “Keff D” Davis was in court in Las Vegas Tuesday to learn his fate from Judge Carli Kierny.
“You don’t get to take a man from his family,” the judge told Davis in announcing his decades behind bars. Acknowledging how long it has taken for justice to be served in the death of the hip hop icon, she added: “You don’t get to take his very life, his whole future, from him …especially when that man is Tupac Shakur.”
Even with his bragging of involvement in the Poetic Justice star’s murder in his own Compton Street Legend memoir, to the cops, on TV and elsewhere over the years, Davis has insisted since his 2023 arrest that he was not guilty. In fact, the ex-gang leader has said he wasn’t even in Sin City that September night over 30 years ago. Prosecutors claimed that Davis acted out of revenge for Shakur and his crew previously beating on Orlando Anderson, Davis’ nephew
As he did when found guilty earlier this year, Davis today said “I’m appealing this case for sure.”
In the aftermath of a September 7, 1996 Mike Tyson fight at Vegas’ MGM Grand, and at the height of the West Coast/East Coast rap beef, Shakur was shot by two rounds in the chest, one in the arm and one in the thigh, while in a car. Death Row Records boss Suge Knight was in the black BMW with Shakur when that mysterious a white Cadillac appeared and gun fire began. Knight lived, but the son of a Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur died at in the hospital six days later.
Like the subsequent death of Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace in March 1997, what happened to Shakur and who was responsible for his demise remained an open case. Over the decades, as Shakur’s stature grew and evolved, there were flare ups of media interest and theories, but not conclusions or arrests.
The arrest and trial this year of Davis seemed to have ended a lot of that speculation.
Though Davis earlier in the hearing disputed not being allowed time already served due to an incident with another inmate, he was silent when Judge Kierny delivered his sentence
Before that, Tupac’s sister Sekyiwa Shakur addressed the court Tuesday on the personal and cultural loss resulting from the ‘California Love’ rapper’s death. Through Shakur’s remarks, Davis was seen rolling his eyes and making other reactions to her words. The Shakur sister asked Judge Kierny to give Davis the maximum time possible behind bars. It was a request reiterated in the Nevada courtroom by Shakur’s stepbrother Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur too.
Already a legend by the time of his death and a movie star to boot, Shakur has been the posthumous subject of the likes of USA Network’s 2018 series Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and Biggie Smalls, the 2017 doc Who Shot Biggie and Tupac?, the 2017 biopic All Eyez on Me from Summit, Morgan Creek, Program Pictures and Codeblack Films over the years. Like the endless music stream of remixes and unreleased tracks, there was also Nick Broomfield’s 2002 feature-length documentary Biggie & Tupac, FX’s Emmy-nominated series Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur, which premiered in 2023, and the Oscar-nominated 2003 film Tupac: Resurrection.
Dead at 25, Tupac would have been 55 if he were still alive today.